A young woman diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disease, lay awake one night struggling with a bad spout of symptoms. She had not been able to get the proper care after being dropped from Tennessee’s Medicare program. She had gotten her original treatment under the insurance TennCare, but needed to continue visiting to see if the medicine had caused damage to her organs. This of course would cost money, money she didn’t have after being dropped from TennCare. Every visit would cost $80-$2,250, so she didn’t go. While laying in pain she yelled out for her mother saying “Mama, please help me! Please take me to the E.R.” her mother said “OK, let's go” she then said, “No I can't, I don't have insurance.” In the morning she had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital anyway. She later died, a death that could have been prevented by a few simple doctor visits. This is the story of Monique White, a middle-class citizen who couldn’t pay for her health insurance. The Wall Street Journal writer Jane Zhang shared this story on December 5, 2006, in an article titled “Amid Fight for Life, A Victim of Lupus Fights for Insurance”. One of many stories just like it in the U.S. We could avoid this by doing something every other wealthy country has done, Universal Health Care. There are many different reasons to provide Health-Care to the people who need it. Especially since someone's life can’t be valued in money, healthcare right now is too expensive, and we need a better solution than what the government has come up with now.

Human life should be more important than money. Why should someone's life be sacrificed for the sake of money or power? In a study done by Harvard Medical School in 2009, it was estimated that 45,000 people die every year because of a lack of insurance. To put that number into perspective the number of deaths from homicide is 24,576 according to the CDC on a page titled “Assault or Homicide” updated on January 5, 2022, which means that for every homicide story heard on the news there are two more people dying from lack of health care, still, people argue whether we should provide healthcare for all. One of those people is former Congressman Raul Labrador from Idaho. In response to a comment from an audience member at a town hall meeting saying that he was mandating the death by supporting the bill slashing funding for Medicaid, he said “You know, that line is so indefensible. Nobody dies because they don't have access to health care.” People do die from lack of health care and the only reason is because of the money needed to provide healthcare.

People at the turn of the twentieth century spent around five dollars on health care annually. I use “Health Care” very loosely since back then it was a world of miracle cures and hospitals only for those who are dying or incredibly poor. Now it is estimated that an average working-age adult spends about $7,000 a year on health care according to the “NHE Fact Sheet”    on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid website. The median wage of an American is $34,250. So an average person spends 20% of their wage on health care. People also need money for other essentials, obvious ones being housing or food, and when it comes down to food and health care, most people are going to choose to have food. This leads to many low-income people not having health care. Health care takes up a majority of someone's income, so to try and help these families the government came up with Medicaid and Medicare.

Under the Obama administration, the Affordable Care Act was put into effect. Under this act, two programs were created: Medicaid and Medicare. Medicaid was created to help citizens with low income. To qualify for Medicaid an individual must have an income of less than $2,523 per month, or $30,276 a year. The Medicaid website describes Medicaid as a program that covers “millions of Americans, including eligible low-income adults, children, pregnant women, elderly adults, and people with disabilities.” They also say that it is run by the states following the requirements set by the federal government. It is a program that provides similar services to private insurance with a significant price drop or on rare occasions for free. Medicare is very similar to the Medicaid program except that it provides its services to those over the age of 65 or those who have a disability. These programs are a great start but they don’t fix the issue of the middle-class citizen who makes too much to qualify for Medicaid, but still struggles with the costs of health insurance.

In my opinion, there should be universal health care. It just makes sense that everyone would have access to simple human necessities like healthcare. Critics argue that the health care under a universal health care system would be sub-par but I argue that any health care is better than none at all. Also, we as humans have created massive advancements and have tackled major issues in the past, so creating a system to provide health care well, is not out of the question. Another argument that is brought up is that it is the people without health care's own fault. Why should we have to fix the mistake of someone who got diabetes from eating too much? To those people, I say everyone should at least have a chance of changing and as humans, we should be responsible for taking care of each other. Another argument against universal health care is that there wouldn’t be enough flexibility. I think we could make a health care system where everyone's basic needs are covered and those who wish can spend their own money on fancy procedures so they can keep their freedom.

There are many reasons that I believe Universal healthcare should be adopted. In this, I mentioned three main reasons, the first being that somebody’s life should matter more than money, next that healthcare is too expensive for most families in the United States, and I also talked about Medicare and Medicaid being good programs, but also not being perfect.  I next discussed why people oppose universal healthcare, and then gave my reasons for how those issues could be fixed or avoided. With all of this information, I still think that the best argument for why Universal healthcare should be enacted is the story of Monique White. A simple middle-class citizen, in one of the richest countries dying because she couldn’t get the healthcare she needed. There are countless other stories just like this. CNN posted an article by Scottie Andrew titled “13% of Americans say they know someone who died after they couldn’t afford health care, survey says” on November 13, 2019. This was an article about a study that was done, where 1,100 people from all 50 states were asked if they knew someone who had died from lack of healthcare. Thirteen percent said yes, which means roughly 34 million people know someone who died from healthcare in the US, which means that there are about 34 million stories about losing someone close to lack of health care. This is absolutely unacceptable, as a major global power, and one of the richest nations, the United States government needs to put an end to this.