It’s difficult for me to understand any argument against universal health care for all Americans. However I can understand that the great concern is how to create such a program without having costs go through the roof. I am going to go out of my way to be apolitical when it comes to universal healthcare. I truly do not believe this is a partisan subject – do you agree or disagree?

As a longtime owner of a small business I know all too well that the costs of benefits like healthcare and retirement plans is a major expense we have to consider on an ongoing basis. When discussing the hiring of new people (since small businesses remain the largest employers this is crucial in terms of improving national employment percentages) the ‘total’ package has to be factored. Many small businesses today are finding that they cannot consider new permanent hires due to the uncertainty of the future costs of healthcare and other benefits like retirement plans. Consequently small business outsourcing of certain job functions has never been more in vogue.

If workers/job seekers (notice I will not call them employees) had access to affordable universal healthcare they would have many more options when it came to finding work. Companies could then decide to either continue to outsource talent on a project basis, or when it made financial sense to hire them full time without the burden of taking on the uncertain costs of rising healthcare.

The United States has the distinction of being the country that brought health insurance into existence going back to World War II when salaries were frozen and non-cash benefits were the only way to incent potential hires. The results look somewhat like an unplanned city – overly complicated, built-in inefficiency and a legacy system that offers patronage and great opportunities for misappropriation of funds.

Whether it was Hillarycare, Obamacare or National Healthcare, the narrative has been for a long time, partisan. I’d like to believe that the basic opposition to universal healthcare is how it could be made to be affordable such that government costs to administer would quickly explode out of sight. That’s a reasonable question to ask and a reasonable topic of discussion. Somehow it has not happened that way.

Is there really any good argument about the concept of universal healthcare for all Americans?