Government-run Healthcare

Government-run Healthcare

Many Americans wish the United States had a government-run healthcare system similar to England’s. But we already have two of them: the VA and the Indian Health Service. ...
Kurt Williamsen

A great healthcare debate is happening in America over whether the healthcare system should be improved via tweaking ObamaCare — a methodology that the new GOP-designed healthcare plan, dubbed the American Health Care Act, seems to be following — or whether an entirely new system should be created. This is one of a series of five articles about how the healthcare system could be changed. The first article, "Healthcare: Which Fix Should We Follow?", explains the goals that a healthcare system should shoot to achieve and lists the four main types of reforms available to the country. The other four articles, including this one, give background and facts about each type of reform and how many goals it would secure. The other articles are entitled "ObamaCare Unraveled," "Does Single-payer Signal a Solution?" and "Free Market Healthcare Reform."

Emotionally speaking, the logic of government control over healthcare is obvious: Somewhere in the United States, at any given moment, is a family that is living with the reality of a child or mother or father or friend who is not only experiencing excruciating torment from disease or injury or from the treatment for that ailment, but the family’s assets have already been depleted, though wellness is not in sight. Take a local girl whom we’ll call Annie. At 16 years old, Annie was a vivacious girl and a track star before illness struck her. Almost overnight, she was overwhelmed with breathing, swallowing, and speech issues. She was placed in intensive care for weeks at a time on multiple occasions, almost dying several times. She was confined to a wheelchair (where she has stayed for about a decade), yet doctors have not been able to determine a cause of her problems, let alone cure her. Though her parents had insurance, they quickly burned through their maximum benefit, having gone through millions of dollars in treatments. To try to pay for the girl’s continued care, her parents put on fundraisers and neighbors donated money — all while the family was forced on a regular basis to drop everything and rush the girl to one hospital or another. Her parents, for their part, would gladly give their lives if only such an act could provide a cure for their daughter. When the girl turned 18, the parents’ burdens were partially lifted when she became a ward of the state, and the state took over payments of her medical bills.

It seems heartless to even suggest that there should be a limit to the amount of care offered to a sick individual, especially a child, as long as there is a hope of help. Yet setting emotion aside and using the criteria listed earlier, we can see that things aren’t quite so simple.

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