For decades it’s been debated whether everyone should have access to free healthcare, most developed countries already have it in place, the only developed country without a free healthcare system being the United States. Unlike the free healthcare provided in every other developed country, the healthcare system in the US is dominated by private, decentralized, insurance companies and certain aid for vulnerable groups in the population (Medicare and Medicaid).
The concept of health insurance is simple and even seems beneficial. You make a plan to pay a third party company a certain amount of money each month In return, when you get any sort of a medical bill, depending on your plan with the third party insurance company, they will cover some or even all of the bill so you have to pay less out of pocket.
Though like every other manmade system, it’s not perfect. Although the United States healthcare runs primarily off this system, approximately 26 million people went uninsured in 2024 out of the entire population. That’s 26 million people who have no assistance when they get hit with a big hospital bill, this as a result drives people to avoid seeking healthcare and contributes to the United States having a 2-5 year shorter lifespan than our European counterparts. The reason for these coverage gaps is also just as simple, profit. Many of these insurance gaps are for-profit organizations and the employees are told to negotiate with the goal of saving the most money possible and not putting the patient first. This leads to things like people who do have insurance being jipped out and left with the majority of the bill, despite having a “premium” plan with the company. it’s easy to see why there are so many complaints about the United States healthcare system.
Despite these large fallacies in the US healthcare system, there are some advantages over our European counterparts’ free healthcare system. The first being specialized care. Compared to free healthcare which gives the same level of treatment to most people in the population. The third party nature of the US healthcare system allows for users to get more specialized and effective treatments for their ailment. The other advantage of insurance based healthcare is speed, People with insurance are able to be treated faster because the hospital prioritizes you depending on your condition. Whereas with European healthcare, many people are added to long waitlists to even be seen for their ailment. For example, in Canada, over 100,000 people have died on waitlists since 2018.
Both free healthcare and US healthcare has bottlenecks. In free healthcare countries like the UK, the bottleneck for people is time and hospital budget. To each hospital the government allocates a certain amount of money, this means that there is a certain supply of every treatment and diagnostic that can be provided before the budget is exceeded, it’s a simple supply-demand issue, and if there is too much demand, the surplus of people are put on a waitlist until more budget is received. This is the only way to make a single payer system work. Whereas in the United States, supply is not the issue. The US system works because the incentive is profit and providers are paid with each procedure, making it better for the insured but worse for those uninsured.
Despite the issues and pros with both, the universal free healthcare system is generally more satisfactory and provides equitable care to more people, the waitlist death issue is for the most part negated when patients are triaged and sorted by medical urgency allowing patients with urgent cancers or medical emergencies to be seen first. If one citizen in Canada and one uninsured citizen in America require a hip replacement, that Canadian may take months to get their replacement, while the uninsured American may simply never get it, and if he does get the replacement he spends years after paying off debt from the treatment. The universal healthcare system is superior in the way that delayed care beats no care at all.
