Right now, there is a woman in America wondering whether to pay for her child’s insulin or to pay for food. Choices like these are daunting, but, with an affordable healthcare program, we can avoid this scenario altogether. We, as a people, have a right to universal healthcare. The program that we have now is a private industry that is unprincipled and immoral. If we had universal healthcare, it could be a regulated, government-run program that would benefit the general public of the United States. Every American citizen deserves the right to an affordable healthcare program. The Constitution states that everyone has the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and one cannot have those without access to affordable healthcare.
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Our privatized health insurance is not beneficial to our people since their main goal, being a business, is to gain more money and spend less of it. Therefore, some companies cut costs on expenses that would otherwise benefit their clients. In Michael Moore’s film “Sicko,” he presents these stories of people who had insurance, but were told they couldn’t get procedures that would have prevented health conditions that would later affect these people. For instance, a woman, Maria, was a client of Blue Shield in California. She insisted that she had a brain tumor and requested to see a neurologist, but Blue Shield insisted that “it’s [wasn’t] medically necessary.” When Maria got ill, while in Japan, the Japan doctors told her that she had a tumor, but Blue Shield maintained that she didn’t have one. So, Maria sued Blue Shield for this seemingly avoidable debacle and won. Though the law was on this woman’s side, most people don’t have it that lucky. Dawnelle Keyes was a woman with Kaiser health insurance whose daughter became ill. Keyes called 911 and her daughter got sent to an emergency room to Martin Luther King Hospital. When they called her HMO, she was told that she must take her daughter to a Kaiser-affiliate hospital, because MLK Hospital was not an affiliate. By the time her daughter arrived to Kaiser, even with the doctors doing the most, she passed away. Even applying for health insurance is just as restricting, such as this common occurrence in an insurance call center. For example, Becky Melke, who works at an insurance call center, recounts an incident of a customer who was so happy because they thought they had finally bought health insurance, but seeing as there were so many restrictions in the application, Becky felt guilty because she knew that this customer was going to be declined by the company because of their pre-existing conditions that were restricted by the insurance
Our privatized health insurance is not beneficial to our people since their main goal, being a business, is to gain more money and spend less of it. Therefore, some companies cut costs on expenses that would otherwise benefit their clients. In Michael Moore’s film “Sicko,” he presents these stories of people who had insurance, but were told they couldn’t get procedures that would have prevented health conditions that would later affect these people. For instance, a woman, Maria, was a client of Blue Shield in California. She insisted that she had a brain tumor and requested to see a neurologist, but Blue Shield insisted that “it’s [wasn’t] medically necessary.” When Maria got ill, while in Japan, the Japan doctors told her that she had a tumor, but Blue Shield maintained that she didn’t have one. So, Maria sued Blue Shield for this seemingly avoidable debacle and won. Though the law was on this woman’s side, most people don’t have it that lucky. Dawnelle Keyes was a woman with Kaiser health insurance whose daughter became ill. Keyes called 911 and her daughter got sent to an emergency room to Martin Luther King Hospital. When they called her HMO, she was told that she must take her daughter to a Kaiser-affiliate hospital, because MLK Hospital was not an affiliate. By the time her daughter arrived to Kaiser, even with the doctors doing the most, she passed away. Even applying for health insurance is just as restricting, such as this common occurrence in an insurance call center. For example, Becky Melke, who works at an insurance call center, recounts an incident of a customer who was so happy because they thought they had finally bought health insurance, but seeing as there were so many restrictions in the application, Becky felt guilty because she knew that this customer was going to be declined by the company because of their pre-existing conditions that were restricted by the insurance