Original editorial or commentary #1

Why we need government run health insurance.

It's about time the government has done something about our health care system. Its ridiculous as the richest nation in the world that we rank so low on health care performance. According to an evaluation of health care systems done by the World Health Organization, the United States ranks 37th out of the 191 nations that were included. Also, the United States spends more of its gross domestic product (16.5 percent) on its National Health Expenditure. That's 61% more than Canada spends, of its GDP, on health care which is the second highest nation in terms of the percentage of GDP spent on health care.

I also don't understand why people are so afraid of the term "socialism". We should all know from basics civics class and just being alive that a lot of central services are already government run, or socialized. Do you think water treatment, police, fire, postal service, coast guard, all the things that are there for us everyday arent run by the government? We all pay our taxes and the government uses that money to pay for these services. Health care is just as essential as any of these services. Besides it being essential, there's another reason that health insurance is just like these other socialized services. Reason being is that very few people can afford to pay all on their own the cost of health care when disaster strikes or they or their loved ones get sick. So we all need insurance which basically means we all need to pool our money together so that when someone does get sick, there's enough money in the pool to pay for that person to get better.

So who should we choose to manage that pool of money? Well, private insurance companies do that now. But there's a problem, on average, these companies take out 10 to 20 cents out of every dollar we put into that pool. Some of that money goes to administrative fees and advertising, but some they use for things that are not even remotely connected to caring for people's health. Like paying for political campaigns against socialized health care. And of course, some of that 10 to 20 cents taken from every dollar is taken as pure profit. Who gets that profit? Investors, generally wealthier people who have money to invest. Ultimately insurance companies are held accountable to their investors. The more profit the executives make, the bigger their bonuses are and as it turns out, one of the best ways of increasing profit is denying people coverage for their health problems. Thats why these insurance companies do this as much as they think they can get away with it. This brings us to the biggest reason why we need socialized health care reform. The government would not take a portion of the pool for profit. That means the government would spend more money on actually caring for people's health.