Health care is a right, not a privilege. In other words, health care should be affordable and accessible rather than unaffordable and inaccessible. Essentially, health care is a human right rather than a privilege resulting from economic clout or various political connections. If it is a human right, health care should be open to all citizens, as a human right, rather than a business operating in an unrestricted manner. The proper role of the government is a sole regulator, taking under its control health care affordability.
Currently, the U.S. healthcare is that of a privilege. Here citizens typically face substantial medical bills that many people may not be capable of paying. According to Walter Trkla, “Today in the USA, the single most common reason for personal bankruptcy is the cost of medical bills billed directly to the patient” (Trkla, 2013). In the United States, there is a corporate health care and for-profit health care. Rather than seeing health care as an essential protection for all citizens, the U.S. healthcare is viewed as a source of profit and as a business. So, its patients (or clients) are not protected. Driven by insurance systems, the U.S. healthcare lacks large-scale government intrusion and fairer distribution. Instead, it has a high level of privatization (it is known that lower numbers of privatized health care are associated with the overall higher effectiveness of the system).
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"Is Healthcare a Right or a Privilege?".
There are countries where the health care systems demonstrate that health care is treated as a right. These are the United Kingdom, Canada, or Sweden. In the UK, for example, the government is responsible for providing adequate care in various conditions and covering the largest part of the expense (typically, paying for a medicine). In Sweden and Canada, too, there is a health-for-all system. Here the government through taxation or other means covers all or almost all expenditures related to health: surgeries, blood tests, and various treatments (Lazarus, 2013). Here healthcare is viewed not as a privilege but as a human right.
