Public Forum March Pro

March Pro Outline

Today I will be taking the Pro side of the resolution, Resolved: The U.S. government should not require its citizens to have health insurance. Before I begin, I would like to define a few key terms:
Citizen: a member of a state to whom he or she owes allegiance and is entitled to its protection.
Health Insurance: Insurance due to loss due to ill health.

Contention 1: Mandatory health insurance is a large cost to government.
There has already been an emperically proven that mandated health insurance costs an enormous sum of money for not only the states, but the US government. According to the New York time, when Massachusetts tried to pass a mandatory health insurance bill, they estimated that it would cost approximately $130 million dollars. Of these $130 million, Governer Patrick Duval proposed that the government would pay $70 million. In response, Speaker of the House Robert DeLeo said that although the governor made a good case, “there is only so much money that we have”. Commonwealth Care, a program that Massachusetts used to subsidize insurance or exclude citizens from the fine, would be a necessary principle in mandated healthcare throughout the country, and has already shown up in the plans for Obamacare. This is another aspect of In addition to this, according to the Cato Institute, “the costs of Commonwealth Care had increased from $133 million in 2007 to an estimated $800 million by the end of 2009... this increase has been only partially offset by the corresponding $250 million drop in state expenditures for the uncompensated care pool, which Massachusetts paid to hospitals if individuals did not have health insurance.” This is the amount of money that the US government, which is already billions of dollars in debt, would be spending on one state. Multiply it by fifty and that would approximately be how much the government would have to spend for nation-wide mandated health insurance.

Contention 2: Mandated health...