Free healthcare saves lives

The argument

Proponents of free healthcare begin from a claim about measurable harm: researchers from Harvard University have attributed around 45,000 deaths a year to a lack of access to affordable healthcare or health insurance, with the 55–64 age bracket alone accounting for roughly 13,000 of them. On this view those deaths are not an unavoidable feature of illness but a consequence of how care is paid for, and they explain why the United States records some of the highest death rates for health problems that are in principle preventable. The mechanism advanced is straightforward. Where treatment carries a price the patient must meet directly, cost becomes a factor in the decision to seek it at all. People who cannot afford to pay do not go to the doctors or the hospital, and the visit that would have identified a condition early simply does not happen. Delay is therefore built into a system that charges at the point of need. Diseases go undiagnosed, or are diagnosed only once they have advanced, and the chance of recovery falls accordingly. The financial barrier does not remove the illness; it removes the early window in which the illness could have been caught. From this, supporters draw a claim about responsibility. Governments, they argue, have a duty to protect their people, and a duty to protect is not discharged by leaving survival to what an individual can afford in the month a symptom appears. If the barrier to early diagnosis is price, then removing price removes the barrier: a free healthcare system would allow people to present earlier, would let clinicians identify disease while it is still treatable, and would turn a share of those preventable deaths into recoveries. On that reasoning, healthcare should be free.

Context

A government has the responsibility to keep people safe. Providing healthcare free of charge saves people’s lives. Therefore, the government has the responsibility to provide free healthcare.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Healthcare is not a right; it is a business. People sell things such as food, clothing, and shelter, which are considered as basic human needs. There is no government-funded program which gives universal free access to these things, so why should healthcare be any different? Free healthcare doesn't necessarily save lives. Just because healthcare is free, doesn't mean that everyone gets timely access to it. Canada has a universal free healthcare system, but their patients wait so long for treatment that people can die before receiving the life-saving care they need. Giving everyone access to free healthcare would simply make it so that more people are able to wait in line for healthcare; which means longer waiting times. The government shouldn't enforce such a policy that could potentially cost someone their lives, who would otherwise have been able to pay for quick treatment. The statistics are also skewed when it comes to how many uninsured people die versus people who are insured. According to Science Daily, "After adjusting figures to account for factors such as income and “health status,” Kronick found that having insurance made little or no difference to the overall mortality rate for people ages 18 to 64. He estimates that no more than 9,000 people die each year who would otherwise survive if they had health insurance."

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Healthcare is not a right. [Rejecting P2] Free healthcare doesn't necessarily save lives. [Rejecting P3] The government doesn't provide universal free access to other basic human needs such as food, shelter, and clothing, so healthcare shouldn't be any different.