Why universal health care can not work at a federal level, but can Essay

Why universal health care can not work at a federal level, but can work at a state level - Essay Example Dr. Harold Pease has illustrated this issue with his discussion of California’s energy policy in the 1990’s, which led to frequent breakdowns and â€Å"brownouts† rather than the propounded goal of the central planning committee. (Pease, 2010) He wrote, â€Å"States have the tendency to look at sister states for models and to borrow from them in refining their own programs. These places of experimentation work to everyone’s advantage. What if we had federalized California’s failed energy policy?† (Pease, 2010) From this criticism, Pease and others claim that it is preferable to enact political experiments with universal healthcare on the State level, so that competing systems can be tested, refined, and adjusted to provide the most efficient and cost-effective public policies, rather than committing to one, single Federal system that remains untested and has a greater chance of failing for everyone. The system of Federalism and decentralized healthcare would thus provide more competition, room for experimentation, and flexibility of operations than would a single national health program. Along with this criticism is the belief that small and local organizations can provide a better quality of healthcare than large, difficult to manage, and over-sized organizations which may be tasked with too many official responsibilities to provide a personalized level of service. While it is easy to extol the virtues of decentralized and local forms of government, other national governments in Europe and around the world have also enacted â€Å"universal† healthcare programs at the Federal level and managed them successfully within the limits of their mandate. The United Kingdom, for example, has a national healthcare system based on socialist principles, as does France, Sweden, and other smaller countries such as Cuba. In this regard, it is possible to conclude that the residual anti-communist sentiment from the Cold War has conditioned Americans to fear socialized medicine despite the fact that it is engrained as a fundamental human right in international treaties. The other side of this view is that it is not a cultural aversion to socialism but rather a national preference for capitalism in America that makes the people to choose private healthcare solutions over government programs. However, the problem is generally not that the rich cannot afford healthcare, but rather that the poor are denied access to it due to lack of financial resources, and society must make a choice as to whether to try to provide a social â€Å"safety net† for all people that relates to the view of healthcare as a human right or to allow those who are poor, marginalized, or uneducated to suffer needlessly because they cannot afford healthcare services. In a country as wealthy and affluent as the U.S., with the world’s leading economy, it seems morally wrong to pretend that society does not have enough money to take care of the poorest people, especially when so much is wasted on other programs, issues, and activities collectively. Thus, universal healthcare requires a mandate from the people to government in order to make it successful, and this can be communicated in elections, demonstrations, polls, or publications. It is in the electoral results that federalism can be particularly helpful in allowing communities to express their differences of opinion and to build policies that uniquely solve their own needs with public resources. For example, Massachusetts was successful in enacting a near universal healthcare policy in their State years before the Obama reforms, as was Illinois. (Volpe, 2008) California, on the other