• As the cost of health care continues to rise, it threatens to consume ever greater amounts of the overall American Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. As more money gets funneled in the direction of health care, less money is available for other important social needs, like funding education services, infrastructure projects and military operations abroad. At the very least, providing low-cost health care is important for individuals, businesses and the nation as a whole.
  
  

Preventative Care

• Increasing national access to preventative care is crucial for limiting the overall cost of health insurance. For the healthiest people in the United States, health insurance often seems to be an unnecessary expense, especially since a healthy person would not expect to use it; however, visiting a doctor for a regular check-up goes a long way toward catching various illnesses and disorders in their infancy and eliminating their long-term catastrophic effects. For example, a person that has melanoma, a type of skin cancer, may notice an abrasion on their skin, but not feel any of the effects. Thus, it becomes easy to dismiss the cancer as a relatively benign issue until it suddenly spreads and becomes incredibly costly to treat. Health care reform passed in 2010 emphasized enabling all Americans to have access to basic preventative care.
  
  

Managing the Risk Pool

• The overall risk pool associated with a health insurance plan also has a major impact on the overall costs of the care. A core argument made by proponents of universal health care is that by including the young and healthy in the same health insurance scheme as the older and potentially more sickly, the overall cost of insurance is decreased for those that need it most. This system, however, does mean that people are technically forced to pay for things they don't necessarily want or need at the moment, but the argument in reaction to that is that health care should be considered a public service. In the same way that a community pays for police officers and fire fighters that are only used occasionally for individuals in the community, the public service is important to have, and the services are cheaper to pay for than on an individual basis if everyone contributes.
  
  

Fair Value for Generic Drugs

• Decreasing the cost of prescription drugs would also go a long way toward reducing the cost of health care overall. There are a few ways this could happen. First, insurance companies could prioritize the use of generic drugs over higher-costing drugs manufactured by pharmaceutical companies. Second, the patents applied to newer drugs could be decreased in time frame, thereby allowing competitors to enter the market for a particular drug earlier and decreasing costs in the medium-term. Third, the United States could encourage foreign companies that make the same or similar drugs to enter the United States market, which, in may cases, would drastically decrease the costs of prescription drugs for consumers.