Pretty sure I can guess the answer ;-) but I wanted to post this here anyway to try to set up a real left-vs-right discussion... and y'all get the libertarians on your side for this one too.
Welcome to the third formal debate hosted by Swords Crossed and open to multi-blog participation! Today we will debate whether the US would benefit from greater governmental control of health care. Our current hybrid system suffers from skyrocketing costs and piecemeal coverage. Both Democratic candidates have proposed expanding programs such as SCHIP and Medicaid and imposing more stringent regulations on private insurers. Will such steps lead to improvements in the efficiency and quality of health care in America, or will they backfire and make an already struggling system worse? Come share your opinion and your reasoning.
Click here to join the debate at cruxlux
Essays with useful background for this debate:
** Ideas for American Healthcare
** Must our final years be torture
** Medical Insurance, two personal tales
** Universal health care dead in CA: implications
** Health Care News on Clinics and Competition
More details below the fold
Basic information from Wikipedia:
The U.S. spends more on health care, both as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) and on a per-capita basis, than any other nation in the world. [...] The debate about U.S. health care concerns questions of access, efficiency, and quality purchased by the high sums spent. The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2000 ranked the U.S. health care system first in both responsiveness and expenditure, but 37th in overall performance and 72nd by overall level of health (among 191 member nations included in the study). The WHO study has been criticized by conservative commentators because "fairness in financial contribution" was used as an assessment factor, marking down countries with high per-capita private or fee-paying health treatment. The CIA World Factbook ranked the United States 41st in the world for lowest infant mortality rate and 45th for highest total life expectancy.
Would greater governmental control of health care improve our system? I've set up a debate at the neutral third-party site cruxlux, which has a format specifically tailored to structured point-counterpoint debate and incorporates user feedback on arguments. I've created a skeleton framework for the debate and now you can add arguments, comment, give points, or engage in conversation on any aspect of the topic of interest to you. Everyone is invited to participate and hopefully the end result will be a constructive examination of the pros and cons of more government involvement in our health care system.
We are also linking all essays written recently on this topic here, so if you write or recently wrote something on your blog please comment below and it will be added to the list. Comments at the original post are encouraged, of course, but please feel free to incorporate that discussion into the large-scale cruxlux debate as well.
Our second debate discussed whether Edwards supporters should prefer Obama or Clinton.
Our first debate discussed the pros and cons of the Electoral College.
Then yes.
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Veritas magna est et praevalet.