Essay Sample: DateIs Healthcare in the United States a Right or Privilege?

That healthcare is a right that should be given to everyone should not be in question. Americans have had their various health care plans to ensure it reaches accessed by as many people as possible, and so are much other government (Knickman & Kovner, 2015). For instance, some European governments provide universal health care where every individual can access healthcare whenever in need. Even developing countries, most of which run on insufficient budgets, the issue of providing healthcare to every citizen is always a problem raised now and then. That illustrates how healthcare is valued, and to a larger extent believed to be a right for every citizen. Its both a social and an ethical issue. The government feels obliged to ensure her citizens are healthy, and by so doing, it ensures it is a host of a healthy society. With that belief, what role should the government then play?

Mostly, the government should play a broad role in ensuring all citizens access healthcare. That comes right below utilizing taxes to provide such services, just like it does with other services like security and infrastructure (Knickman & Kovner, 2015). The Affordable Care Act, introducing by Democrats under President Obama was to ensure everyone in the United States accessed affordable health care. The Act ostensibly sought regulatory overhaul and expansion of insurance coverage since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid. All these are past regulatory interventions that had been established to ensure more and more Americans access health care. The policy, signed in 2014, within two years reduced the uninsured by half, giving them access to health services they were not entitled with before (Williams, 2016). The improved coverage was due to changes made to insurance policies which involved funding from government, employers, and employees.

Essentially, what ACA was doing was taking the obligation of ensuring every American has access to healthcare, and it did so because it believes its the responsibility of the government, ethically and socially to provide healthcare. Economically, it is an expensive affair. In particular, Americans who had been on insurance already ACA forced them to pay more premiums, just to cover those who had no such services (Geyman, 2015). It also comes at the expense of their taxes, given the policy affected both the public and private insurance and healthcare providers. It is an ethical issue, but from someone who believes healthcare to be a right and the government is obligated to provide that, then all those questions stand unconvincing.

References

Geyman, J. (2015). What Role Should the Government Have in U. S. Health Care?. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-geyman/what-role-should-the-gove_b_8891730.html

Knickman, J., & Kovner, A. (2015). Jonas and Kovner's Health Care Delivery in the United States. New York: Springer Publishing Company.

Williams, J. (2016). The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Meets the Persistently Uninsured. Social Policy & Administration, 50(4), 452-466. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/spol.12238