People from all over the world come to the Cleveland Clinic for care yet not everyone in Cuyahoga County is healthy, explain.

People do come from all over the world to the Cleveland Clinic, the number one ranked hospital in the U.S., for their health care needs. One thing it is not rated number one at, however, is its affordability. Providing the best care means that you have to have the best technologies and resources available for you to use. These advanced resources come at a very high price. Millions of dollars have to be invested into research by health companies in order to develop these revolutionary medicines and health equipment. These companies then have to earn all that expense back and also earn a profit on top of that. That is a very big bill for health care providers like the Cleveland Clinic to pay. Because it so expensive to purchase, the Cleveland Clinic then has to bill its patients the same high price. The cost of the best health care is very expensive. So expensive, that the average household in Cuyahoga County would struggle to afford it. This is why some people in Cuyahoga County are not getting the best health care in the country, even though it is in their backyard.

According to Ben Furnas, “Since 1994, the cost per person of American Health Care has more than doubled, with an annual growth rate regularly more than twice that of inflation.” The cost of health care is going to continue to rise every year. Something has to be done to stop this. Even with the most advanced health care, that people travel from all over to receive, we are not the healthiest country. Italy alone has a better infant mortality rate and life expectancy than that of the U.S.

Some people might say that it is the American lifestyle that has caused us to not be as healthy. This lifestyle is one of low exercise and poor nutrition. However, other countries in the world could not be beating us in areas such as infant mortality as consistently as they have been if it were not for the way their health care system was set up. This is one of my biggest arguments for universal health care; all the countries that practice it tend to have healthier citizens than we do. They are healthier because they can afford the coverage. Clark Newhall says, ”Millions of us are suffering and millions more will suffer soon. More than 20,000 people die each year in this famine because they cannot afford the price of for-profit health insurance. “ That statistic would drop drastically, maybe even to none if those people could afford the right coverage.

Some people are against universal health care because of various reasons. These reasons are mainly that they don’t want to pay for someone else’s problems, or that by socializing the health system there would be no more incentive for competition and medical advances would virtually halt. That places like the Cleveland Clinic would no longer be the number one place to get health care because they would no longer be able to research new medicine. I ask these people, when is it time to say enough is enough? How much farther into debt must we go as a country and how much more should health providers charge for it to be considered too expensive? Something has to be done. Other countries rank above the U.S. in various areas of health because their citizens are able to afford it. Why have the best health care if the majority of our population cannot even afford it?