In countries such as France, Italy, and Japan, free healthcare is available to everyone. Yet in the United States, health care prices have risen astronomically. While there are many resources available for low income families, not all families can qualify for these services. In France, they use a system called Statutory Health Insurance where the residents there have increased taxes, and the funds gathered are put towards healthcare. Free healthcare is a relative term, as healthcare will never be entirely free. However, it is taking that cost off of the American people and giving the cost to the government. Is it a reasonable expectation to assume that the United States will be able to follow in the footsteps of other countries and offer free healthcare? Is free healthcare in the United States even possible?
As you dive deeper into healthcare and its costs, you find that the prices are very high. With the number of people who work in hospitals, there are a lot of salaries that need to be paid. However, as of a study made around the year 2022, hospitals make an average of $223.7 million. Doctors make a larger sum of money compared to almost all other occupations. This leads me to ask, is this higher salary reasonable? The fact is this: doctors make on average $237,615 a year. Considering that the average pay for a job is $63,795, doctors make about 3.73 times more money than the average person. Why do doctors get paid so much more? The cost of education for medical school is much higher than the price of attendance for most other institutions, but is $237,615 really necessary? To add, in the United States, the cost of surgery has risen significantly. Before the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020, the average cost of a hospital stay and surgery was $10,394; two years later it was $13,072. With nearly $3,000 in inflation within the time span of two years, it hasn’t been easy for America. The average American household cannot afford to pay for surgeries that expensive.
Next, let’s focus on the financial state of our government. As of September 2024, the United States is about $34.3 trillion in debt—the highest amount of debt in the world. At this point, our country is unable to fund a project as large as free healthcare for all 334.9 million people. At the surface level, it seems that free healthcare would be impossible for the United States to obtain, but below the surface, there is so much more to learn. The United States collects $4.47 trillion in taxes, so how is the United States still in so much debt? In the year 2024, the United States spent $6.75 trillion dollars, creating a huge deficit. The already poor economic status of the US combined with further debt is not quite helping the fight for free healthcare. With so much debt, where did that money go? Well, the spending areas include: social security, national defense, health, net interest, Medicare, income security, transportation, agriculture, education, and veteran benefits. But when combining the percentages of the budget for each specified area, it equaled around 86%. Our government has supported the ongoing wars in Ukraine and other countries, while we are hardly staying afloat ourselves.
If doctors were paid less, even just 2 times as much as the normal job, their payment would be more than substantial. After so many years of these high taxes, where is this money going? Not to our healthcare. If more of our taxes were put towards healthcare, and less money towards other things, the US could be healthier, both from a medical and economic standpoint. With less money to doctors, less money can be spent just to afford medical care. Why should we be left to pay so much money to stay alive, while doctors and our government officials live superfluous lives?
