1. Why does the government need to provide health care?
Because it's generally considered the public duty to provide basic needs to those who can't afford them in a developed country where doing so is feasible. We already do this with several other needs, like food and shelter.
2. Where will the government get the money to pay for said health care?
Don't pretend that poor people having no health insurance doesn't cost you (if you live in the US) money now. It already does. I'll explain more below.
3. Is the government even capable of providing inexpensive, thorough health coverage and insurance to everyone?
The intent behind this particular legislation is not to provide government-provided health insurance for absolutely everything. This is an extremely off-kilter interpretation of what this is all about. It's about providing it to people who wouldn't otherwise have it at all.
4. What makes a government program better than the free-market system that we had until a few days ago?
The free-market system still exists. Apparently you have no clue what the bill is actually about, so maybe you should read up on it a bit before speaking. I can't stress this part enough.
At any rate, there are all kinds of people right now who flat-out don't have and can't afford insurance: The unemployed, college students, people of very low income, etc. Even the elderly, with Medicare, often need supplementary insurance, and often can't afford that.
Here's the thing. People not having health insurance
still costs you money and does so in a more inefficient manner than providing them health insurance does.
Imagine a poor family with no health insurance. They aren't likely to have a regular physician with regular appointments for themselves or their children, for obvious reasons. This makes them more likely to become ill (or otherwise require treatment) in the first place, and gives them incentive to "wait it out, in case it's nothing" or otherwise gamble a bit with their health when they do need treatment, or to otherwise ignore their own health problems since they can't afford treatment.
Now, let's say their kid seriously
does need treatment for something. In many cases, they wind up at, say, the ER, where they can't be turned down. This is extremely wasteful, because those hospital services aren't designed to handle things that a general practitioner at a private practice would be doing. It's overkill, and it doesn't work effectively. The kid ends up seeing a doctor who has never seen the kid before, and after they're sent home, there's absolutely no follow-up, which can be rather harmful and increases the chances of things going wrong again. In other words, there's no rapport with the patients, and the wrong services wind up being used to render the treatment.
In addition to this, the simple fact of people being sick more often, and in worse ways (as a result of what I just mentioned) is a drain on society and its resources. It's not good for
anyone for people to get more sick more often.
My sister works at a local children's hospital and sees this kind of stuff all the time. People being unable to properly afford health care causes severe problems in the system, and is a drain on resources anyway.
Basically, what I'm getting at here is that even if poor people cannot afford health care, they're
still going to get it one way or another; it would be inhumane and antisocial for society to completely turn down treatment of them, even in areas where free clinics are sparse or don't exist.
In effect, it's more productive for society as a whole and more efficient to simply make sure that people can afford health care when they need it, because the costs of people being unable to afford it are passed on to everyone else
regardless, even in a slightly less direct manner, and the end result is far worse in general.
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Topic: US House passes Health Care bill (Read 22822 times)