Bradley Bertram
BASV 319: Ethics in Public and Private Sectors
University of Arizona
A major issue the United States has today is health care. There are problems in overall medical care received, cost of care, cost of insurance, and the amount of people uninsured. Prior to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the United States ran an almost completely privatized system of health care (exception being Medicare/Medicaid). The idea was that the economy, and therefore the people, would dictate the cost of health care. Now, since 2010, the United States runs a hybrid system of health care. People are still able …show more content…
Let’s start with the winners. The biggest winners of a single payer healthcare system are those who have preexisting conditions. Health insurance is essentially a gamble that people make with a company that pays out when they get need medical care. For most people, they lose this bet on a monthly basis. Most people are healthy more often than sick, so they pay more a month in insurance than they do would have in healthcare. However, people with preexisting conditions are not a good gamble for the insurance company. It is more likely that they are going to have to pay out, so they raise their premiums for these people; often times making insurance unaffordable to them. Single payer healthcare fixes this issue by having all individuals pay a flat rate per month. The other winner in single payer healthcare are those who are uninsured. These people can’t afford the premiums that insurance companies require, which means they have no payout when they require medical care, so they have to pay the hospital themselves. Single payer healthcare aims to lower the cost of healthcare for everybody, and those who are unemployed would still be covered by those who are working. Now that we’ve talked about the “winners,” let’s determine who the “losers” of single payer healthcare are. The biggest losers to a single payer system are healthy people. Healthy people do not require medical care, so they would be paying into a system that they do not utilize. The other losers are those who are working, or can afford the insurance. Because a single payer system pays for those people who aren’t working and can’t afford to pay in, the rest of working society pays the bill for those people. So what would Rawls believe? He would be for a single payer healthcare system. This is because he believes in equality for all. Using the initial situation