Today marks the second annual Universal Health Care Lobby Day, an event organized by members of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) at colleges across the state.
More than 300 premed students are taking leave from memorizing the steps of glycolysis to travel to Sacramento to advocate universal health care.
These students, though, are proposing a policy that is unequivocally against their own interests, a policy that will cripple the state’s health care system.
Their case rests on studies that inflate the number of uninsured who cannot afford health insurance.
Universal health care is a system that would deprive the population of choice by assigning a single bureaucratically imposed solution to a diverse population with complex problems.
It negates the entire concept of personal responsibility – particularly in cases where people can afford health insurance and choose not to – and removes a very large incentive for productivity.
In short, universal health care is absolutely un-American.
There are currently four plans for universal health care being discussed by the state Legislature, including a bill proposed by Gov. Schwarzenegger that would require that all Californians be insured at the expense of employers, doctors and those being insured.
Another plan, the single-payer system, abolishes the private insurance industry and establishes the government as the financier of all health care.
The single-payer system is the plan that AMSA strongly endorses. This system, though not necessarily socialized health care, is likely to devolve into socialized health care.
As the government controls all health care funds, it is likely to use its monopoly power to take on greater control in order to keep costs down, limiting availability of services and dictating salaries to doctors.
This control, known as bulk negotiation, is touted as a benefit by supporters. It would certainly squeeze the profits of pharmaceutical companies and health care providers. But, while this may provide benefits in the short run, this strategy will serve to destroy innovation in the long run by removing the profit incentive.
The financing and control over the provision of government health care would undoubtedly fall to a bureaucracy. Anyone who’s been to the DMV can imagine how disastrous such a health care scheme would be.
The right to health care in socialized countries is often meaningless when it comes to receiving the care; about a million Brits are waiting to get into hospitals at any given time, according to the British government.
Similarly, Canadians in need of surgery wait an average of 17.9 weeks for their procedures – a number that would be even higher if many Canadians did not receive health care in the U.S. at the expense of the Canadian government.
And these are countries touted by supporters of universal health care as examples of the system’s success.
One of the main arguments for universal health care is that the U.S. spends more on health care than socialized countries. But many of these countries shave cost by denying care, suggesting that the extra expenditure by the U.S. is hardly frivolous.
The main impetus for universal health care in the U.S., say its proponents, is based on studies showing that 15 percent of the population is uninsured. However, a quarter of these are only uninsured for a period of less than a year.
And the vast majority of Americans would not be persuaded to finance the health care of those who have the means to purchase health insurance but choose not to purchase it.
According to the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured study presented to the Senate in support of a single-payer system, only 7 percent of the uninsured deliberately choose not to purchase health care. How do the studies come up with these figures for the uninsured? They ask them.
The study asserts that many of the uninsured cannot afford insurance because 64 percent of them earn just less than twice the federal poverty level.
The study puts the average family cost of health insurance out-of-pocket at $9,000 a year and claims that these premiums are unaffordable.
With 64 percent of the uninsured having yearly incomes of $30,000, the cost of insurance would amount to 30 percent of their income. This may be a large share of total expense, but is not necessarily unaffordable.
These studies ignore any element of personal responsibility by claiming that health insurance is unaffordable for this segment of the uninsured based only on a self-reported inability to pay.
Most Americans would reject such a system if they were aware of the methods used to estimate that health care was unaffordable.
Just one-third of the 15 percent of the American population that is uninsured have incomes below the federal poverty level, and slightly more than half of that segment have jobs.
Excluding illegal immigrants, this share drops by an additional fifth. Thus, working American citizens who are clearly unable to afford insurance make up just 2 percent of the population.
But for most Americans, the health care system is working.
In a recent ABC News survey, 89 percent of Americans reported being satisfied with the quality of their health care. Proponents of universal health care are really asking the vast majority of the population that is insured to jeopardize their top-notch health care for a relatively small sliver of the population.
If proponents of universal health care succeed at misleading the population about the true unaffordability of health care, you might want to start preparing; if you foresee yourself needing medical procedures in the near future, I suggest you start waiting in line.
If you’re an ex-premed like Lazar, send your reasons for quitting to dlazar@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.