The Government Should Provide Health Care

The Government Should Provide Health Care

Introduction

Our health care system is broken . If we go on without change , the consequences will be devastating for millions of Americans and disastrous for the nation in human and economic terms ' Hillary Rodham Clinton , 1994

Today millions of Americans cannot afford the sufficient healthcare they need . Politicians , experts , and health care providers have warned for more than four decades that the American health care system was poised on the verge of a . meltdown (Flood 200 . Constant concerns about the state of the health

care system produced many promises from presidents and congressional officials to change this situation , but brought few positive results . Today , it is clear that state governments should be the principal source of policy innovation in health care that will provide the public with sufficient healthcare . Government should ensure that every citizen , naturalized citizen , and alien resident is entitled to basic level or core ' health care benefits (Daniels 1 . It should also be a basic premise of that system that every citizen who is able to pay toward those health care services should do so . A major argument of this is that government alone has the ultimate responsibility for the health care of its community and not business or industry

Government Regulation and the Health Care System

Government should provide health care to all citizens regardless of their ability to pay for that care . There are different ways of expressing the basic moral demand for sufficient health care as due First , people have a right to health care that they can claim against the government . Second , the governments have responsibility to provide health care that will generate commitment to social solidarity . As one of the leading proponents of a just , easily accessible , and universal care system , Norman Daniels , has claimed , by keeping people close to normal functioning , health care preserves for people the ability to participate in the political , social , and economic life of their society (Daniels 1 . To this one can add the right to participate in the family and private life of communities . The idea in Daniels 's vision of health care is that of a fair equality of opportunity (Daniels 3

The concept of state health care to all citizens is strong in Canada and Western Europe . The governments focus on the need of the citizens living together to support and help one another . The governments provide health and social resources necessary for people to function as a community (McDonough 160 . The main focus is on the needs of the people living in one country . Guaranteed access to health care is meant to locate the citizens within a community and produce a communal and not just a private good

The fundamental principle of the state health care is simply stated . It is that affordable , high-quality health care should be available to all citizens without financial barriers to access . There are a variety of regulation forms through which the principle may be implemented . For example , a tax-based public...