The Art of Complaining

One of the struggles I had growing up was the lack of health insurance that my family had for years. For about five years, both my mom and I were uninsured (2014-2019). That meant not having access to any doctors really for all five of those years because it was a decision between being able to pay our bills and have food or being able to go to the doctor.

As we know, this is not an issue that just affects my family. For example, in Illinois, about 7.3% (this is about 900,000 people) of the population is uninsured as of 2019. This doesn’t seem like all that many when you compare it to the 18.4% (this is over 5 million people) of Texans uninsured as of 2019.

This has always been something that frustrates me because why is health care a privilege, not a right? My argument has always been it should be a right because no one should have to choose between being able to keep their home, feed their kids, etc, or get medical assistance when they need it. However, the sad reality is that health insurance is considered a privilege.

Many of the arguments against universal health insurance have something to do with either that people need to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” in order to have the privilege of health care and/or they often complain about what it would cost the economy to do so. However, Dr. Ashish Jha explains in the Youtube video, “Is U.S. health care the best or 'least effective' system in the modern world?”, this is not the case. For example, Dr. Jha gives the example of Massachusetts, where there are very few uninsured people and there are incredible medical innovations and greater access to quality health care than those in Texas have. Dr. Jha also explains that the economy won’t go bankrupt if we decide to have universal health care and wait times will not increase dramatically. As Dr. Jha puts it, we basically just have to decide that we are going to cover everyone.

I would argue that it is finally time we do that. Why allow so many people to die and get sick with diseases we know how to treat? Why force those who already have so many struggles to struggle even more? People should not have to choose between being healthy and being able to have a place to live. Everyone deserves that right, not just the well-off.

Data is from: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-population/?dataView=1&currentTimeframe=0&selectedRows=%7B%22states%22:%7B%22illinois%22:%7B%7D,%22tennessee%22:%7B%7D,%22texas%22:%7B%7D,%22mississippi%22:%7B%7D,%22massachusetts%22:%7B%7D%7D%7D&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D

video mentioned is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn8oCbScitc