A Minor Musing About The NSDA 2016 Proposed Single-Payer Healthcare Resolution

Resolved: The United States has a moral obligation to adopt a single-payer healthcare system.

I don't like this resolution, so I hope the overview will be short and sweet.

First, there will likely be too many arguments about whether stats from other countries should apply because no one apparently agrees on what constitutes a single-payer system. This NPR article offers the following definition:

A single payer refers to a system in which one entity (usually the government) pays all the medical bills for a specific population. And usually (though, again, not always) that entity sets the prices for medical procedures. 

A single-payer system is not the same thing as socialized medicine. In a truly socialized medicine system, the government not only pays the bills but also owns the health care facilities and employs the professionals who work there.

The article goes on to cite Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who contends that only Canada and Taiwan have "true single payer systems." 

Meanwhile, this Atlantic article contends:

The other point of confusion is that “Europe” has single-payer health care, and America should be more like Europe. European countries’ medical systems are all pretty different. Some of them, like the U.K., have single-payer health care. Germany has a system much like ours, except the insurers aren’t for-profit companies and it’s cheaper for the patients. Other countries have mixed public-private systems that guarantee a basic level of health care but allow the rich to buy supplemental private insurance. [Emphasis Mine]

This confusion will result in a large number of debates descending into "throw out the Great Britain statistics" or "prefer my Great Britain statistics" and then arguments about whether the existence of private insurers constitutes a "true single payer" system. 

Further, this resolution limits aff ground. Aff debaters are forced to defend a single-payer system which has its own set of problems. Further, aff debaters not only have to defend a flawed system; they have to prove the US has a "moral obligation" to implement that flawed system.

Negs can defend the status quo which works well for people who have jobs that provide good insurance. Those citizens would be losers under a single-payer system. Negs can also advocate socialized medicine which is not single-payer. They can refuse to advocate any system at all and attack the failings of a single-payer system. They can support a single-payer system but claim that no moral obligation exists to implement it. They can even contend that the United States has a legal/constitutional/contractual obligation to adopt a single-payer system but that such an obligation does not rise to the level of a moral obligation. Finally, they can argue that Medicare means that the US has fulfilled its moral obligation to adopt a single-payer system because the resolution does not specify that the system be available to all citizens and there is no need to create an additional plan or obligation.

The intent of this resolution may be the same as the intent behind the November/December 2012 resolution Resolved: The United States ought to guarantee universal health care for its citizens; however, focusing on the method rather than the result will cause the debate to degenerate into a definitions debate in which the aff has little ground.