One of the most interesting conversations we have going on the site so far is about creating universal health care. Here are the facts: nearly 47 million people in this country are currently uninsured; of those 47 million, more than 80% come from working families; while in 1987, 70% of people had employer-based insurance, that number is down to 59.5%; and, finally, 40% of America’s uninsured live in households that earn more than $50,000 a year. The reason for the increasing number of uninsured Americans is simple: insurance premiums are rising at just about 5 times the rate of inflation.It’s an incredibly important issue, and our users are doing a great job tackling a lot of important questions. Some of them are skeptical:

Gagarin wants to know how we would pay for a universal health care program:

UHC would be very peachy and nice, but someone has to tell me how they’re going to pay for it, WITHOUT saying they’re going to “tax the rich people ’cause they don’t need the money” because thinking that will increase revenue rather than reduce it is wishful thinking.

Lobachevsky thinks the government might be overstepping its role:

The government should be involved in situations that individuals cannot control. I do believe that the state of our current health care system is not satisfactory, and that it requires some government involvement, but not to the extent of national health care. The national government should put its time and effort, and our money, into stimulating competition in the health insurance market as to make it more affordable to all Americans.

In my opinion, universal health care is a moral imperative. While stephendolenc compares health care to “universal cell phone ownership [and] universal fitness club memberships,” I think the comparison to public education is much more apt. I don’t believe we have any more of a right to deny an American citizen the ability to be treated by a doctor than we have to deny them the services of the Fire Department should their home catch fire.

According to the National Coalition on Health Care’s fact sheet (I reference them because they are not only non-profit but “rigorously non-partisan”), 18,000 people between the ages of 25-64 die in this country every year simply because they are uninsured. They receive less preventative care, are diagnosed later, and have higher mortality rates than Americans with health coverage.

Moreover, while universal health care might be an expensive proposition, continuing to allow 47 million Americans to live without insurance has social and financial costs that far exceed our ability to continue to ignore the problem: the United States government alone spends $100 billion a year providing health services to uninsured Americans; hospitals lose $34 billion a year on care for patients who can’t pay; and other public and private groups spend $37 billion a year for these same services. What’s worse is that in most cases, these health problems could be easily treated if discovered early on and at a much lower cost to both society and the individual.

Everything we’ve discussed so far completely disregards the fact that with all Americans currently pay for health insurance (more than in any other nation in the world), we aren’t getting the quality of care we paid for. As DylanSuher writes:

In the case of healthcare, the profit motive does not drive the corporation to serve the consumer. This is the reason Americans pay the most money for the worst service of any industrialized country. I agree that the state has no business running what a private entity can do much better. But when a private entity would have no incentive to serve the customer, we have the state provide the service, which is why we have state-run tax collecting and a state-run police force.

This isn’t to say that the only solutions to our nation’s health care problems come in the form of policies offered by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Republicans like John McCain and Mike Huckabee are also talking about the need to reform our health care system and reduce costs so that more Americans can afford care. What is clear today, is that universal health care is an idea that a lot of politicians and others are talking about in the build-up to the 2008 election. What isn’t clear is how a gridlocked Congress in a country with a struggling economy will address such an important issue.

There are no easy answers to this problem, just tough choices. I don’t imagine that the For A Better America community can solve this country’s health care concerns in one go around, but here are a few questions we can begin to think about before the next entry in what I’m hoping will be a series on health care:

1. Is access to health care as basic a right as public education or a state-run police force?
2. Should the federal government compete with private health insurance providers to offer health care to those not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid?
3. Should health care be mandated?
4. How can we reduce the costs of health care under the current system?