The Importance Of Universal Health Care

Universal health care is defined as “coverage that all people have access to the health services they need (prevention, promotion, treatment, rehabilitation and palliative care) without the risk of financial hardship when paying for them.” (World Health Organization, 2016), while user pay health care is owned and operated by private businesses. Health care is an important issue because as many as a thirty-three million American went without health care in the 2014 calendar year (Bureau, 2016), which was equal to ten percent of the total population. A study conducted at Harvard medical school and Cambridge health alliance found that uninsured working age Americans had a forty percent higher risk of death than working age Americans who were privately …show more content…
By providing a universal health care system as opposed to having a user pay system in place, a higher quality of living for people who could not otherwise afford proper or necessary treatments could be achieved while also decreasing the chance of death associated with the lack of treatment. It is reported that as many as sixteen million adults in the United States, aged nineteen to sixty-four were had either no insurance, sporadic coverage, or insurance coverage that exposed them to high health care costs during 2003 (Schoen, 2005) which would cause them to be unable to receive medical care. With so many uninsured adults unable to accesses proper care as many of them cannot afford the necessary treatment which causes an estimated forty-five thousand preventable deaths a year (Wilper et al., 2009). With a universal health care system in place, people are more likely to go to see a primary care physician for preventative care as opposed to trying to waiting out the problem which could possibly lead to more severe conditions requiring emergency care and treatment, which leads to increased costs and the increased likely hood of death. The rate of excess death caused by lack of medical care has increase over the last twenty-one years from twenty-five percent risk of death, to forty percent risk of death. With the implementation of a universal health care system the amount of people going without proper medical treatment due to lack of insurance would be decreased and the risk of unnecessary death from lack of health insurance leading to lacking, or non-existent treatment, would be decreased. While healthcare would improve the quality of life it would also help to decrease the discrimination from health care which prevents many from accessing