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Jailen Duncan

Prof. Slaker

ENG 1201

1 November 2019

Healthcare in the USA

Healthcare is a very controversial topic not only in the United States but everywhere

around the world. Many people have healthcare and many people do not. The cost for healthcare

can be very expensive depending on where you are in the world and the majority of people can

not afford to pay the high price of healthcare, especially if they have children. If people have

multiple children, then they will have to pay a high price for multiple people to be covered with

healthcare. Healthcare, if you do not know already, is defined as efforts made to maintain or

restore physical, mental, or emotional well being by trained professionals. People get healthcare

so that when they get sick or injured, their healthcare provider can help cover the cost of the

medical bills. There is a worldwide debate on whether healthcare should be free or not. Some

people say it should be free because everyone gets injured and sometimes it is out of the victims

control. Others, believe that free healthcare will cause doctors and nurses’ salaries to go down.

They also believe that if healthcare is free, then the quality of it will also go down. If people have

to pay less for healthcare, then there will be no motive to provide top notch treatment to the

patients anymore. I believe that healthcare should be free because not everyone can afford it,

people can not control when they get hurt or sick, and it should be considered a right for all

humans.
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The average human can not afford the costs of healthcare, which is a reason it should be

free. The average cost of healthcare for a family is $1,168 a month. The monthly salary for

american citizens is $3,714. That may seem like a good price but it is not. The monthly cost of

healthcare is one-third of the average monthly salary. Once people pay their healthcare bill, they

still will have to pay bills for the house, car notes, and buy groceries for their families. This

leaves very little money for other things like fun activities, dining out, and buying new things.

Also, many adults in the US have children. They will have to provide for their kids in other ways

outside of just healthcare. If their kids go to a school like mine, then most of their school work

will be online, which means their parents will have to buy Wi-Fi for the house so the kids can do

their work. If their child has a disability, then their parents will get frequent medical bills from

the doctor because of all of the required procedures that are needed to help treat the disability

that the child has. Another thing, people will have to buy new clothes, shoes, houses, cars, etc.

So when the healthcare bill, the electric bill, and the vectran bill comes, most families will be all

out of money. The percent of people working for minimum wage in the U.S is 59%. That is

more than half of the people in the U.S that are making less than 10 dollars an hour. The annual

income for minimum wage workers is around 15,000 dollars a year. If we want to look at things

from a yearly perspective, the average annual cost for healthcare is about 10,000 dollars. The

average amount of money spent on gas every year in the U.S is 2,000 dollars. The yearly amount

spent on food is around 7,000 dollars. You can see that from a yearly perspective, the majority of

people in the U.S will be all out of money after paying 2-3 bills. In an article from “The

Balance” a writer by the name of Kimberly Amadeo says “In 2016, health care cost 18% of

GDP. That was a staggering US$9,892 per person. Exactly 18% of patients skipped prescriptions
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because of the cost” (Amadeo). The cost at one point was up to 10,000 dollars a person. This

shows how many people can not afford the huge costs of healthcare, which is a reason why I

believe it should be free.

Another reason why healthcare should be free is because people have little control over

how they get injured. Most injuries are accidental and they happen randomly. People should not

have to be tasked with paying absurd amounts of money while dealing with an injury. If the

injury is unknown, the patient may have to go to multiple doctors and get multiple treatments for

their injuries. The worst part is when someone dies. When someone dies, the family, which is

more than likely not very rich, is tasked with paying for all of the person's medical bills and they

still may have to come 100% out of pocket for a funeral and burial. This is a perfect example of

how people can get caught up in the system and have to pay lots of money. In an article by the

“American Bar Association,” Mary Gerisch, the author, writes, “Losing my wife of 34 years is

one of the most painful things I’ve ever experienced, but it was made much worse by the battles

Jeanette and I had over insurance and by the lingering questions over whether Jeanette might

have survived or lived more comfortably if she’d gotten the right tests and treatments. After

Jeanette died, I asked her doctor why they’d done no testing during her remission to detect any

growth of cancer beyond her thyroid. I was informed that testing was “cost prohibitive” and may

not provide conclusive results” (Gerisch). The man in this quote is in the exact same situation

that I spoke about before the quote. His wife died of cancer and he was tasked with paying for

everything prior to her death. The people in the hospital did not provide her with the adequate

tests and treatments that she needed to survive because they did not have the money to pay for

those treatments. Since the testing cost was more than what the family could pay, someone's life

was lost. Just because someone could not pay a large amount of money for a medical test, her
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entire family has to grieve because she is no longer here. People are dying because they do not

have enough money for these high tech medical tests and medicines. This ties into my thesis

because the woman that died had no control over her cancer but the doctors were still trying to

get her and her family to pay for the proper care in order to survive. This is another reason why

healthcare should be free, because people can not control their injuries.

Another reason why I believe healthcare should be free is because I believe that

Healthcare should be considered a human right. Everybody on this earth is human, and we all get

injured at some point or another. Human rights is something that nobody can take away from

another person and I feel that healthcare should be considered on of those things. If healthcare

was considered a human right, everyone's lives will become better in some way. The citizens’

lives will get better because they will finally get what they have been wanting. Making

healthcare not only free to everyone, but a human right will take a lot of weight off of the

governments shoulders because the people will finally have what they have been wanting for the

longest time. The government will no longer have to deal with the constant pressure of what to

do about healthcare if they just decide to make it a right to everyone. In an article by Vox,

written by Sean Illing, Illing writes, “ I don’t think people should be buying and selling health

care in this way, because, again, I don’t think health care should be treated as a product in the

conventional sense” (Illing). Illing says that he does not believe that people should be buying and

selling healthcare as if healthcare is some form of free market product. Healthcare is

significantly more important than any free market product. Illing also says, “ A system that tilts

so heavily toward the rich is unjust in my mind. People should not be denied health care because

they don’t make enough money, and I’m willing to sacrifice that dynamism at the top if it means

less human suffering” (Illing). This ties into my previous point of people not being able to afford
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healthcare. It should not be denied to people simply because they do not have the funds to pay

for it. If healthcare was a human right, however, there would be no money involved and it would

be free to everyone. Illing made a great point about sacrifice. People have to be willing to

sacrifice in order for this to work. If everyone comes together and makes the proper sacrifices

and decisions, it will lead to a significant drop in human suffering and more happy citizens.

While I believe that healthcare should be free, and should be a human right, others think

the opposite. Some people think that healthcare should not be a human right because the market

for healthcare will go down drastically and thus, causing the quality to drop as well. When

something costs less, the quality will automatically go down. An example would be with

clothes. Regular clothes cost a normal price but designer clothes will cost much more because

they use better and more expensive fabrics to make the clothes. The more money people spend

on their healthcare, the better treatment they will get from the doctors. Sean Illing, an author for

Vox, spoke with a professional doctor to get the other side of the argument. The doctor said, “If

the government does become the sole purchaser of healthcare, they’re monopsonist, meaning we

have a market with one buyer and many sellers, and prices, therefore, become inefficiently low”

(Garthwaite). Garthwaite, the professional doctor, shows us that if healthcare were to be free, the

market for it will be broken. If the government were to pay for everyone's healthcare, there

would become a monopoly in the country. There will be many sellers of healthcare with only one

buyer, the government. This is could be a reasonable argument, but if my idea of healthcare

being a right was implemented into the U.S, the whole market problem would be solved. There

would be no money involved in healthcare, which would keep the market as is.
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This first image shows the different types of healthcare and what they all do. The image includes

smaller images about what each type of healthcare provider does. There are colored parts on the

image to show different tasks that healthcare professionals complete on a day to day basis. There

are small images of showing that the healthcare pros have to help people become healthy, use

computers, and give people medicine. I chose this picture because it shows that there are many

different types of healthcare providers and they all have different tasks that they have to carry

out.

The second image shows money wrapped around a syringe. I chose this image because it is

showing how much money goes into getting proper healthcare. It is also showing the imbalance

between the amount of money that people pay vs, how much treatment they get. As you can see

in the photo, there are many bills wrapped around one syringe. This shows that people pay lots of
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money and do not get sufficient healthcare in return. Many people will pay thousands of dollars

and still end up sick after the procedures are over. I included this picture to show the current

flaws in the healthcare epidemic in the U.S. This is a big problem because there are many people

out there being ripped off and taken advantage of in regards to healthcare. I hope people can

learn from this essay and take away valuable information from it so they will become more

cautious and more alert about their healthcare and what they are paying for, and getting in return.

In conclusion, I believe healthcare should be free to all citizens, and even should be

considered a human right because it is expensive and people can not afford it, and people have

little or no control over their injuries, or the severity of them. Healthcare can honestly be argued

both ways. I believe in this topic very much and I believe that if healthcare were to be free, it

would help many families save money and be able to provide better for their families. Many

doctors also believe that healthcare should be free because they have to cater to the patients.

Some doctors feel bad for patients with really bad injuries that can not pay for the sufficient

healthcare. Many easily avoidable deaths occur because people cannot afford their healthcare so

they do not receive the proper treatment. The way to fix this; make healthcare free, or make it a

human right for everyone. Another way to fix this issue is to give people an option to pay their

healthcare over time. People may not have the money for their bills at that moment, but they may

be able to pay the bill over a certain amount of time. This will make the patients happy because

they do not have to deal with the burden of paying a lump sum of money at one time. This will

make the healthcare provider happy because they will still get the money that they earned, it will

just not be all upfront.

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Works Cited

Amadeo, Kimberly. “Why America Is the Only Rich Country Without Universal Health

Care.” The Balance, The Balance, 25 June 2019, https://www.thebalance.com/universal-

health-care-4156211.

“Health Care As a Human Right.” American Bar Association, ABA Journal,

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/the-

state-of-healthcare-in-the-united-states/health-care-as-a-human-right/.

Illing, Sean. “I Think Health Care Is a Right. I Asked an Expert to Tell Me Why I'm Wrong.”

Vox, Vox, 30 June 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-

politics/2017/6/30/15879702/health-care-capitalism-free-market-socialism-single-payer

“Pros & Cons - ProCon.org.” Right to Health Care, ProCon.org, https://healthcare.procon.org/.

Sanders, Bernie. “Health Care Is a Right, Not a Privilege.” HuffPost, HuffPost, 7 Dec. 2017,

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/health-care-is-a-right-no_b_212770.