Think about a man who is so poor that he can barely pay...
Universal Health Care
I would like to thank my opponent for the wonderful topic to debate, this should prove to be interesting. FIRST - I want to make it clear that in this round I am going to support single-payer health care rather than the health care mandate that Obamacare is. Contention 1: Health care should be a right the problem with companies providing health care is that it is, in a way, an inelastic demand. What is an inelastic demand? well it is a service that if the price was raised people could just stop buying it. A lot of people say "Well, You can stop buying health insurance," and this is a troubled way of thinking. Think about a man who is so poor that he can barely pay for the clothes on his back, he finds it hard to make it to every next meal; this man gets a cut on his hand, he wraps it up and moves on. 2 days later his hand hurts where he was cut; he has the obvious choice of going to the doctor and getting it looked at, or being able to pay for his next few meals. He chooses to eat, because you cant live without food, 3 days later the man is dead from staph infection.... This man had to choose between dying from starvation or dying from staph infection...... AND the government is the only thing suitable for providing rights to people because of the fact that there isn't that competition there. Contention 2: saves money You feel a pain in your side and ignore it, a few days later your appendix explodes and you're in the hospital getting an expensive surgery, if you had caught it at the pain and gone to the doctor then it would have cost a couple bucks of antibiotics, but the surgery cost thousands of dollars..... You can't pay it because you don't have insurance, you file bankruptcy and the cost of that surgery is added to the premiums of other people with insurance...... catching things early is key to saving money and we can't do that when we're so reluctant to go to the doctors, in Japan people go to the doctors 6 times a year on average. On Capitalism194's points (his point) 'Major insurance companies will fail because people flock to the govt.' -------- first off this isn't true for the fact that I think all universal health care systems except Taiwan have it set up like this.... the government pays for the insurance................. that means that they pay the insurance companies.... All I have to do is point at Health insurance companies in the UK which are doing perfectly fine. (his point) 'competition is non-existent' -------- All insurance is, is paying for health care, the actual care received comes from hospitals not the govt... and the fact that the insurance companies are still there means that this point fails to gain traction..... SIDENOTE----- nearly all of our serious developments in medication happen due to publicly funded universities and hospitals