Should the U.S. have nationalized health care?

The National Health Plan

Introduction

The National Health plan was initiated to provide money saving solutions through the concept of self insurance. In an era where millions of people are uninsured, costs are rising and bureaucracy is rapidly expanding, a nationalized health plan might seem like a good and viable option It may be true that certain medical procedures are avoided if patients have the wrong or no insurance at all. Time and efforts are also wasted in bureaucracy and billings. . Reports of denied treatment have been surfacing as well, causing many people to believe that a nationalized health plan will solve their problems. What they do not seem to realize is the list of problems that it would bring with it. Yes, certain problems may be solved with such a step, but the factors we will discuss here will show that the Nationalized Health Plan will do more harm than good.

The National Health Plan which is being so actively pursued in the congress will cause many small and medium sized businesses to cut down on the number of jobs and increase their healthcare costs. Such businesses do not have very large margins to play with and cannot absorb shocks of this magnitude. In addition, we will have to rely on the government to decide what medical and health care choices are available for the people. This will unleash a deadly and diverse range of procedural problems which will take up most of the crucial time in handling them. Medical procedures will be subject to red tape and eventually, people will try to manipulate the whole system. Hence, this field will be marred with corrupt practices and inefficiencies. In the field of medicine, time is of critical importance and such wastages will only absorb more time and eat up more efforts (Pringleff, 10).

Budgeting will be so much of a hassle for the government that the processes will either start suffering with direct effects on the common man or the government will have to resort to abolishing it. As budgeting will be done by the Congressional Budgeting Office, we can be sure that the costs of healthcare will be rising. It is absolutely clear that the cost effects of this step will fall on all the US taxpayers. The US government has never been successful in bringing the costs down. The plan will cause all working Americans to pay more taxes to cover the out of control costs. It is Imminent that a national plan will cause costs to snowball and once that happens, the people will feel the adverse effects of it (Pringleff, 10).

If we take the example of the Children's Health Program in Minnesota, we can find that due to the heavy taxing of thousands of dollars was the reason why many doctors fled and went elsewhere to practice. The Children's Health Plan was actually a limited scale version of the National Health Plan and we can see that it failed. It would be ...