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My 101st Debate: Universal Health Care

Thanks, Bsh! Since Pro's 'Just Society' framework is only being contested for the purposes of making my theft argument, and since this round is exclusively for rebuttals, I will hold off on addressing the issues regarding it that Pro has brought up this round. However, do keep in mind that Pro has yet to justify his utilitarian framework, and that if I successfully affirm my libertarian framework, I automatically win, since UHC would be an inherently unjust form of redistribution. R1) Saving Lives One important observation we must make is that *every* society has a population of unfortunate people who suffer as a result of their poverty; this is true of every society which has ever existed, be it a welfare state, nomadic tribe, or communistic regime. Thus, this argument's success depends on whether or not implementing UHC has a significantly beneficial effect on society's impoverished people. I will aim to show that, at best, the effect is neutral. Pro's argument here mainly consists of a bunch of scary stats showing the supposedly dire state of those who are uninsured, but he never really shows why UHC is necessarily going to fix it Besides the bare assertion of that it is 'intuitive', he presents a case study regarding how Massachusetts saw a whopping 2.6% decrease in death rates after the implementation of a universal healthcare program. However, this is obviously correlation/causation fallacy-- there is no reason for us to believe that the random (minuscule) drop in death rates is actually caused by the implementation of UHC there. This is especially evident when we notice that the change in death rate is almost negligible; in the United States, death rates easily fluctuate 0.5% to 1% per year, and that there has already been a long-term decline in death rates from the mid-20th century to 2010 [1]. Pro's noted correlation is highly unlikely to be indicative of anything significant. Thus, Pro has basically done nothing to show that UHC actually fixes the societal problems that he notes. Pro asserts that it is 'intuitive', yet the best empirical example he can come up with is a bare correlation which is so small that it can be considered trivial. No matter how compelling an idea might sound in theory, it is futile if it doesn't work out empirically. There are a few reasons for the UHC's lack of apparent efficacy-- 1. Pro's scary statistics aren't actually that scary. "Today, 88 percent of Americans already have health insurance, and of the remaining 12 percent, half are without insurance for less than four months per year due to job changes and so on. Of the remaining uninsured, only one percent of Americans under the age of sixty-five are uninsurable. [2] And most of those who are uninsured lack coverage not because they are poor, which they are not, but because they choose so, realizing that the price is too high for the benefits received. And as the healthy drop their coverage, the premiums rise ever more for those still covered." [3]. Thus, UHC generally doesn't actually help that many people, as most of the people who use it aren't really in dire need of it; this obviously reduces how much tangible benefit UHC is going to show in practice. 2. People tend to use free services to the fullest; this is quite uncontroversial. When healthcare is made free to people, they often do overspend on non-essential medical services, as shown by research done by the RAND corporation on the issue [4]. The effects of this UHC-induced resource overuse are very evident in all the examples I cited last round showing how inordinately long medical wait times and lower overall healthcare quality have become characteristics of UHC countries. Thus, UHC, due to it being free and egalitarian in nature, often fails to sufficiently help those who most need it, thereby mitigating much of its positive impact. R2) The Economy 1. In order to make this argument, Pro relies on the assumption of UHC having a significant positive impact. If we examine his sub-points, we see that each of them is basically composed of him naming some negative effects of an unhealthy population, and then assuming that UHC will fix this, thus leading to a substantial financial gain. However, the efficacy of UHC has been called into question quite a bit in my own opening argument as well as in my R1; we cannot assume that UHC will serve as an effective solution to any of the health-related economic problems Pro brings up. 2. Pro completely ignores the fact that UHC *costs* money as well. Obamacare, which isn't even a full-fledged UHC program, costed the United States 2.8 trillion dollars in 2012 alone [5] [6]. The "$1.1 trillion over 10 years" that UHC supposedly saves doesn't even come *close* to reimbursing the government for its expenditures. Pro's claims that UHC countries spend less on healthcare is simply false; France spends roughly 40% of its GDP on healthcare, which is over twice that of the figure provided by Pro for the pre-ACA United States [7]. Pro's mention of Oman is simply him cherry-picking his statistics-- Oman's relatively tiny population in conjunction with its booming oil economy ensure that its healthcare/GDP ratio would be low. If we look at more generic, applicable case-studies such as Canada, Great Britain, and France, we see that UHC's economic effects aren't nearly as pretty. 3. Even if we assume that all of the economic benefits of UHC mentioned by Pro are real, we see that most of them only benefit private companies and individuals; thus, they can do very little to balance out the incredible governmental expense of UHC, since only a fraction of private sector money actually goes to the government in the form of taxes. Meanwhile, the huge financial burden on the government can only serve to harm the general populace in the form of higher taxes, foreign debt, and inflation (see constructive case). With ten minutes left on my argument time limit, I'm going to have to abstain from addressing Pro's individual UHC economic benefits this round... I will try getting Pro's permission to do so next round. Regardless, I have shown that even if we assume that his benefits are for real, they still don't show that UHC creates a net gain for society. CONCLUSION: I have demonstrated that UHC isn't nearly as effective at saving lives and improving healthcare quality as Pro would like us to believe, and that the economic harms of UHC far outweigh whatever economic benefits it may have. [1] http://www.cdc.gov... [2] Jill D. Foley, Uninsured in the United States: The Nonelderly Population without Health Insurance (Washington, DC: Employee Benefits Research Institute, April 1991): 16. [3] http://www.independent.org... [4] http://www.rand.org... [5] http://www.pnhp.org... [6] http://www.forbes.com... [7] http://www.businessweek.com... [8] http://www.pnhp.org...