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How Not to Argue Against Universal Health Care

If your goal is to invalidate universal health care as a solution for the U.S., and your case involves comparing national health care systems, then please understand this before proceeding: There is, and will never be, a perfect health care system (and this is because the humans who manage the system are imperfect).

When you point to the presence of poorly-paid doctors in Germany, under-funded hospitals in Britain or Japan, or long waiting-times in Canada, you're effectively presupposing one of two things: (a) That, whereas other countries' health care systems have problems such as these, ours is perfect (not even the most hard-line conservative opponent of universal health care argues this); or (b) That these problems are less tolerable than Americans having no or inadequate access to heath care (to paraphrase one prominent journalist, I'd rather suffer the danger of hospitals going broke than see people going broke because of their health care costs).

In short, as I've always argued, the question we should be debating is not which health care system is perfect, but which ones are less imperfect.