Universal health care is our right -- and the answer

Health care has been in the news nonstop. Everyone is arguing about whether Congress should repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something else, or try to fix it. Unfortunately, no one is asking the most important question of this debate: Is universal health care a right? Until this question is answered, we will continue to have the expensive, unequal, ineffective health care system we currently have.

Americans brag about being the best in the world. Unfortunately, where health care is concerned, we do not even come close. In 2000, the World Health Organization evaluated the health care of 191 countries. When the report was finished, the United States came out No. 37 behind Columbia, Costa Rica and all other western democracies. That is not a statistic to be proud of. The problem is that we have a complicated, multi-system, expensive approach to health care. We spend more money (17 percent of GDP) than any other western democracy (most spend under 10 percent of GDP) for worse outcomes with millions of people left uninsured.

But according to T.R. Reid in “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care,” universal health care is possible if we learn from other countries. It does not require that we embrace “socialized medicine” (although we already have socialized medicine: the Veteran’s Administration). We just need to decide that access to health care is a right of all Americans and get the profit out of the health insurance industry. We also have to accept that the individual mandate is required to make the system work. Not easy, but if enough voters said “enough!” and demanded universal health care as a right of all Americans, we could join the rest of the developed world in health. Wouldn’t that be an amazing achievement?

This story was originally published April 7, 2017 at 5:13 PM with the headline "Universal health care is our right -- and the answer."