The purpose of this research is to examine the pros and cons of whether the U.S. government should provide health care to all citizens without cost. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which issues associated with gov ernment-sponsored health care have arisen in American society in recent years and then to discuss arguments for and against implementation of such a program in the country.
The main reason the source of health-care provision has become so important in the U.S. recently is that its costs have since 1970 risen faster than the ability of either growth of the economy in general and the power to pay of individuals in particular. American health care has been described as a "$1 trillion monster" in which more than 16 percent of the popula tion lacks medical insurance and in which rising expenses out pace inflation dramatically. Health care ac counted for six percent of gross national product (gross domes tic product) in 1971 but fourteen percent in 1996.
Increasing medical costs care have been attributed to advances in medical technology and knowledge that have made better medical interventions possible--as well as seductive and more expensive. Gaylin cites the invention of the electronic fetal monitor in the 1970s as an example, noting that after its appearance about one-third of all hospital births are by Caesarean because of the EFM's standard use in delivery rooms as a device for measuring increased fetal heartbeat during labor, hence increased fetal distress. But, says Gaylin, "it is ridiculous to suggest that one out of three pregnancies re quires [expensive] surgical intervention." Progressive expan sion of definitions of psychiatric illnesses, progress in elective-surgery techniques, and breakthroughs in therapeutic medicine meant that medicine "became very effective at treating sick people and saving lives--so effective, in fact, that until the advent of AIDS we arrogantly assumed that...