In this day and age of rising health care costs and economic stagnation, we must ask ourselves where we can make improvements, and where we can cut out unnecessary things. One of these places is in the health care industry. One of the reasons medicine is so expensive- why breaking your leg could bankrupt you- is the parasitic entity that is the medical insurance industry. Each year, the industry siphons billions of dollars from the public in return for no real service; even if you make every payment, one whiff of anything they could twist into a pre-existing condition is grounds to be immediately cut off the second you might start costing them money. It’s not helped by the sheer amount of malpractice insurance that doctors must pay each and every year. What, then, can be done?
The answer is simple, but quite difficult to actually implement due to corporate interests. If we remove the hospitals from corporate control and place them under the direct regulation of the government, this cuts out not only a vast money-sink but a tangled bureaucracy that served no purpose but to fatten itself on ill-gotten gains. The billions of dollars that would otherwise have done little more than line an executive’s pockets can then be put to real use, providing low-cost or even free healthcare to the citizens and ensuring one of the most important things to a country: its citizens’ health. A healthy country is a productive country, and a productive country is a rich country.
Another benefit of government health care regulation is the streamlining of records and the consolidation of each hospital and patient into a single database. In this way there is no such thing as lost medical records, and there is a quick and convenient roster of the availability of difficult-to-obtain things, like specialized surgeries or organs for transplantation. Pharmaceuticals, too, will become cheaper with government regulation of the health care industry. With an entire country’s worth of demand for drugs at its fingertips, the government can then buy in bulk for a fraction of what it costs to pay for a small amount of medicine. Also, with government control, prices of healthcare in general would drop. With the expenses of healthcare spread out across an entire nation instead of only the insured members of your carrier pool, no one might ever have to face the thought of choosing between bankruptcy or death ever again.