For the last two weeks there has been a ferocious debate going on within the Tetra Strategy offices on Obama’s plans for universal healthcare in the US.

Two of our finest interns Susan (a long-time Republican from South Carolina) and Henry (a long-time Labour Party supporter from Suffolk) have taken the debate to the Tetra blog.

IS UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE A GOOD THING FOR THE US?

See the arguments FOR and AGAINST below and decide for yourself! (Please feel free to post your comments)

NO

Universal health care is not the answer to America’s problems. Veterans’ Affairs hospitals offer an example of the unsuitability of national healthcare for America. Care is famously poor; waits are long and according to the Cato Institute, 90% of Veterans choose not to use this benefit. Europe’s socialized medicine offers a further case-study of the pitfalls of a nationalized system. Waits in England are extensive where about 1 million people must wait for care and around 200,000 must wait for more than six months according to Dr. David Gratzer, a Canadian expert on Healthcare. Long lines are not the only drawback of social medicine; care is sometimes difficult to come by. Gratzer states that about 1.5 million citizens of Ontario cannot obtain a physician. Furthermore, America cannot afford to bear the cost of universal healthcare. Brian M. Riedel in his statement to a subcommittee hearing in Washington, outlined America’s troubling financial situation.

He discussed how Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were already more than the budget can handle. According to Mr. Riedl, if America cut programmes to keep these three in existence, all government initiatives except defence would be gone by 2030 and only those three programmes would remain in the budget in 2049. America does not have the capacity for the federal government to cover the enormous costs of a national healthcare plan. Moreover, the Federal government does not have the constitutional authority to approve such measures. Powers such as trade, commerce, defence and taxation are allocated to the Federal government in the constitution, not healthcare.

Reform should occur in America through the means it was meant to, the states. The new Massachusetts health care plan offers a model for states. Under the law, every citizen of the state must have health insurance.

However, the government subsidies coverage for low income families like in the current Medicare and Medicaid programs. Individuals get to keep their right to choose their own healthcare and increased competition reduces prices. In the end, it’s a private solution to a national problem where every citizen benefits.

Susan is a resident of Washington, DC and currently studying Classics and a Certificate in Ethics at Duke University. She is interning for the summer.

YES

It is fifty years since American big business, in the luxury of cheap labour and booming profits, boldly agreed to provide health insurance to its workforce, a revolutionary move that inaugurated the period described as the “golden age of American medicine.”

Yet half a century later, it is a move that has spectacularly failed. Today, America is presented with a healthcare system that consumes $1 in every $6 generated (totalling at over $2 trillion pa), yields infant mortality and life expectancy rates below the OECD’s global average whilst rendering 47 million Americans bereft of healthcare. Equally, American health insurance costs have stifled the growth of its once robust industries, with General Motors’s admitting that for every car they sold in America, $1,400 was added to cover employee healthcare obligations.

The failures of private healthcare are also social in nature, serving to perpetuate America’s racial and social inequalities, a truth corroborated by the fact that a child born in El Salvador has a better chance of survival than its counterpart in Detroit.

Despite these abhorrent failings, sceptics of universal healthcare continue to cite the expense of such a move, but when America already spends twice the average of economically developed countries on healthcare, such criticism is clearly redundant.

So why Universal Healthcare?

Firstly because the American public welcome such a change, with a CBS poll revealing that 90% of Americans believe that US healthcare requires at least “fundamental change.”

Second, because it has been indisputably proven to be the more cost effective and socially beneficial alternative, a truth which the WHO, the OECD and the World Bank all hold to be evident. Should this need substantiation, the fact that 35 of the top 40 countries for life expectancy operate a primarily universal health policy is surely no coincidence.

To conclude, since Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points America has supposed to be the world’s ideological and moral authority. If they are to continue, America must recognise that its peoples’ welfare is not an issue of politics, but of moral imperative. To achieve this, it must rid itself of a socially regressive, profligate and defunct system and adopt its viable and morally superior alternative, universal healthcare.

Henry is a history graduate from SOAS University who began his internship with Tetra Strategy in June 2009.