Letter to the Editor

Author’s Note



This is my first draft of the Letter to the Editor. It is not at all rough in that I have been trying to correct any errors that I see, and I have already asked a couple people to read it and to tell me what they thought I needed to correct. I like the fact that I was able to find some very credible statistics to counter the author’s argument, and the fact that I can say that I have some authority to argue the subject because I am a Nursing major and that I know Nursing majors that already have hospital experience. I am worried that my argument might now seem whole. I kind of feel like something might be missing, but I don’t know what it is. I worry that I don’t express myself fully, and that maybe it might be easy for someone to argue back against me. I would like encouraging but still helpful responses on anything that I can do to make my argument more complete and convincing. I don’t really know what else to add/change to make this letter better.
 

To the Editor:
The September 7, 2008 Editorial article “Universal health-care system is essential” contends that a Universal health care coverage system is crucial and is, in fact, the only way to fix our current health care problems. While the author makes an effort to provide substantiating data and figures, his argument does not seem totally accurate. Although, it is quite obvious that some of our citizens in United States are suffering from lack of health care, I do not believe that the situation is really as bad as the article indicates. I also do not believe that a Universal Health Care system is the best solution to our problems.
I am very interested in the delivery of health care, and am currently studying to be a nurse at Texas Christian University. While I have not had actual clinical experience and am not an expert in the delivery of care, I am in my second year of studies and have taken some nursing classes. I have also talked to some students that our older than me and who are already involved in their clinical studies. When I asked some of them what they thought about Universal Health care, they told me that from their experiences in the hospital, they just could not see how it could work- there are too many problems associated with it.
When I read this article, a couple of things bothered me and after doing some research, I would like to comment on them. First of all, I wouldn’t say that the nation’s health care is “broken;” it just has some problems like any policy in any nation has problems. Second of all, I think that the statistics used to express the point exaggerate the situation. The uninsured problem is not as bad as the writer is making it sound. When reading the article, the author makes it seem like there is a huge amount of people that are uninsured and suffering from lack of health care and that there is nothing that they can do about it. According to the Census Bureau report “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005,” “there are 8.3 million uninsured people who make between $50,000 and $74,999 per year and 8.74 million who make more than $75,000 a year. That is roughly 17 million people who ought to be able to ‘afford’ health insurance because they make substantially more than the median household income of $46,326.” In addition, the Kaiser Family Foundation says that the number of uninsured Americans that do not qualify for government programs and make less than $50,000 a year is between 8.2 million and 13.9 million which is between 2.7 and 4.6 percent of the population; this is a much smaller portion of the population than proponents of Universal Health Care would have you believe. Finally, this article is very general in the sense that it does not really mention how implementing Universal Health Care is going to work and how it is going to fix anything, and assuming that Universal Health Care coverage is the only option, the article also does not even mention any of the potential problems that the United States is bound to face. It simply says that Universal health care is “challenge members of the next Congress can ill-afford to ignore.”