Category | Op Ed

Letter to the editor: Response to Universal healthcare anyone?

Published on March 13, 2007 by The Sentinel

Dear Editor,   

    Will Duncan’s article “Universal health care anyone?” made the
argument that government-provided universal health care is not the road
to success for the American health care system and that the current
system is perfectly fine as it is. Obviously, the author did not do his
homework. Even the biggest proponents of free-markets acknowledge there
is something gravely wrong with the American health care system.


 Some very basic facts that illustrate this problem well: America
spends more than any other country on health care as a percentage of
GDP at 16 percent, even as the world’s largest economy [almost double
of the second largest]; it also spends the most dollars per person, yet
has 47 million uninsured citizens and is poorly ranked in recent
comparative health care studies.   

    Duncan claims that “The United States has the best
health care in the world because the government does not run it,” and
“you get what you pay for.”  According to the World Health
Organization, that’s not the case. America’s health care was ranked
37th with France and Italy ranked top two [both have variations on the
single-payer universal health care system and only spend 9.5 percent
and 8.4 percent of their GDPs, respectively.]  For what we pay we
should be ranked number one by a large margin, so clearly we do not
“get what [we] pay for”.

    Canada, the model health care system for many
proposed congressional changes, has its flaws, but it is important to
note these are not flaws inherent to a single-payer health care system.
For instance, the article suggested that Canadian operation waiting
times were outrageous. This is correct. However, the waiting times are
a result of Canada’s abnormally low doctor-to-patient ratio, an issue
other countries with public health care systems do not have nearly as
bad. Cuba, for instance, has the second highest doctor-to-patient ratio
in the world at one doctor per 175 people [second to Italy] and has the
lowest infant morality rate of any country in the Americas. Cuba’s
medical issues are not waiting times or medical expertise, but lack of
technology, the direct result of the prolonged embargo the US has
placed on the country and not a flaw in the system itself.

    Our answer to the health care system is not to
maintain the status quo, and not to completely privatize the system,
allowing hundreds of thousands to die each year as a result of
structural poverty. We must implement a form of publicly financed
universal health care system. Action is not only a fiscal obligation, a
universal system would lower our astronomical health care costs and
give the government leverage to broker deals with the price-gouging
pharmaceutical companies, there is a moral obligation. We cannot allow
the weakest among us to suffer as a result of stubbornness to accept a
practical exception to American capitalist dogma.

Matthew Boynton
International Affairs
Freshman