No Need for Universal Healthcare

One of the more prevalent arguments in the debate about universal health insurance is that we need to make sure everyone is insured because insured folks are paying for the uninsured. The theory goes that an uninsured person visits the ER for a serious injury. Without insurance and being unable to pay his bills, the hospital gets stuck with the liability of the man's costs. From here, the hospital passes the cost over to insured patients and also by receiving tax funding from you and I. Therefore, as the argument goes, you and I are paying for the uninsured while they get a free ride.

As some of you may know, I have been persuaded by this argument in the past considering my stance on social issues is that people should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it does not harm others. I can admit that even though I'm not directly or physically harmed by someone else's choice to forgo health insurance, there is potential that I can be harmed financially by paying for the costs incurred by those who do not have health insurance.

However, thanks to recent research by CATO, it appears that we don't end up paying for the uninsured after all. Surprisingly, it seems that the uninsured themselves end up paying for the costs of themselves:

Many uninsured people show up at the hospital, get treated, and then don’t pay
their bills. Doctors and hospitals scream an awful lot about having to
deliver “uncompensated” care. But two recent studies — one on doctors services by Jonathan Gruber and David Rodriguez, the other on hospital services in California
by Glenn Melnick and Katya Fonkych – show that the uninsured who do pay
their bills more than make up for the uninsured who don’t. Why? The
uninsured pay the highest prices. Gruber and Rodriguez write, “Our best
estimate is that physicians provide negative uncompensated care to the
uninsured, earning more on uninsured patients than on insured patients with
comparable treatments.”

One more reason to oppose government imposed universal health care.