How America Benefits from Joining The Universal Healthcare

In America, there has always been a lot of controversies dealing with health care in our country. Since the early 20th century, America and some of it’s people have been ready for a change. Before Obamacare was a thing, a lot of people in America was being denied for health care because of pre-existing problems they had, which for the most part were barely ever any of those citizens fault. I believe America should conform like a lot of the other countries in the world be join in on universal health care.

The first reason I believe America could greatly benefit from universal health care is for obvious reasons, that nobody, despite pre-existing conditions, can ever be denied for health care. In the movie “Sicko”, Michael Moore asked his fans and followers to send in to him their health care horror stories. After receiving over twenty-thousand emails overnight, Moore set out on a quest to visit some of the people who had awful stories with their health insurance. Some people had claimed that they were denied from even buying health insurance in the first place because of pre-existing conditions, such as previously having diabetes, cancer and even extremes as being “too skinny” or “too fat”. That’s not even the worst part, some people who already owned health insurance were being denied from getting the surgeries/procedures done that their doctors had recommended.

For example, one woman had told Moore that her doctor had found a tumor in her brain that they of course wanted to remove as quickly as possible. When the woman got a letter back from her insurance, they clearly stated that her brain tumor was “non-life threatening”, and she didn’t really need to have it removed. Unfortunately, this woman ended up dying from her brain tumor. She’s not even the half of it, many other people Moore had visited in his film had talked about how their loved ones passed away because they were denied their surgery. A mother lost her daughter because the hospital she was taken to wouldn’t even look at her because of the health insurance she had and another woman lost her husband because he needing a bone transplant that their health insurance had denied. If America had universal health care, nobody would ever have to be denied or rejected for surgeries or for their pre-existing conditions.

Secondly, I believe another great reason why America should switch to universal health care is because of the cost differences. In the movie, Moore visits France, a country that supposedly has one of the best health care systems on the planet. Moore finds a family in France who talk about they are in absolutely no debt from health insurance or their health care, where in America people are basically drowning in their debt to their health care provider. Moore had brought a group of the people he found that could not get health care and a bunch of 9/11 volunteers to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in search for free health care on American Soil. Though they didn’t have any luck finding health care there, they did however walk the streets of Guantanamo in search for a doctor’s office of pharmacy. The pharmacy they found at told a 9/11 volunteer, who had been paying about $150 per every inhaler she purchased, was only 5 cents. The woman had almost broken down into tears because of the huge price difference, and she spoke on how much happier and how much easier life would be with that cost instead of the $100+ every inhaler.

The ending of that last paragraph is exactly what leads me into my next paragraph, on how universal health care in America would make a lot of people's’ lives a lot easier and stress-free. One of the articles we received spoke about how a Canadian woman and her husband, who had gone on vacation to Hawaii, delivered her baby in a hospital in Honolulu. The woman needed to have a emergency c-section due to the fact her baby was born nine-weeks early. After leaving the hospital and heading back home to Canada, the family left the states with a medical bill of $950,000. Jennifer Huculak, the mother of the child said in an interview “It makes you sick to your stomach. Who can pay a million-dollar medical bill? Who can afford that?” (Bologna). Further into the article, Huculak says that it has been a “very stressful year” (Bologna). There were many examples of people having extremely stressful lives in the movie. Such as, an elderly man who still has to work a hard labor job because he has to pay for his and his wife’s medication, when he should obviously be retired and relaxing. Also, there was an elderly couple who had gone bankrupt and were forced to move in with their daughter after the father had three heart attacks and the mother was diagnosed with cancer. With universal health care, these people would not have such high bills, they’d actually have virtually no bills whatsoever.

The one and only reason why I believe that universal healthcare would go wrong in America is the fact that there’s ungodly wait-times for procedures and surgeries. According to Olga Khazan, in her article “What if America Had Canada’s Healthcare System?”, she says “Commonwealth Fund found that 33 percent of Canadians waited six days or more to see a specialist, compared to 19 percent of Americans”. She also stated that “Canadians tend to wait longer for ER care than patients in other countries: One in 10 patients in a Canadian ER will wait eight hours or more, and the average wait time is four hours”.

In conclusion, I believe that America could very much benefit from having universal healthcare. It would not only keep a lot of citizens a lot more relaxed, but it could save thousands of Americans from going bankrupt each year, and it would also help a lot of citizens who had previously been turned down from buying health care or even having a procedure done that their insurance company refused to pay for. Yes, it could possible mean longer wait times, but if America could for once not be all about instant gratification, maybe we could all look past the wait times. If waiting on the procedure was life-threatening, then I could understand maybe being moved to the top of the waitlist, but if not, then nobody needs to get what they want right now. Patience is a very important part of life, which a lot of Americans really forgot what that word really means.