Rhetorical Analysis Essay: Is It Necessary to Have Health Insurance

Introduction

What would you do if you may not afford your doctor? Recently, the absurdly high costs and bills involved in medical care have made sick people all over the world to avoid necessary medication and emergency services. For that reason, the current government has come up with lawsuits that are threatening to cripple the health sector, which has resulted in a lot of noise in the country. In The New York Times article "How Much Will Americans Sacrifice for Good Health Care?" the editors discussed these issue, as well as the challenges of the Affordable Care Act, an options that can help to extend the coverage of extra citizens, and the role of the government in the provision of better health insurance. The article's authors argue that the issue of escalated health care services costs should not be made political, as politics are characterized by efforts aimed at benefiting an individual or a group of people. And while they provided a lot of valuable information when constructing their arguments, they failed to give the needed credibility to the article.

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Context

According to "How Much Will Americans Sacrifice for Good Health Care?" Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010 with three main primary goals. Firstly, create affordable health insurance inexpensive to the majority of people. This has been archived through the lower cost to families with low incomes. Secondly, expand the Medicaid program to cover everybody with a salary which is below 138% of the federal poverty level. Thirdly, the Affordable Care Act was supposed to support the innovative medical care delivery methods that had been designed to lower the costs of healthcare. Therefore, the article covers three main sections which include what the options are? What would happen to private insurance? And who pays? To effectively communicate the idea and pass message effectively to the reader and the writer uses pathos and logos.

Audiences and Purpose

The editor's primary rationale is to inform and get the audiences such as the clients, patients, seniors, aged, Baby Boomers and the young people when it comes to their medical health care and then determine what information would be useful to them. Therefore, there is a want to object all the communication and advertising approaches. Why do you necessitate at aiming your promotion? Well, without it, you might only use a technique that does not get to every audience. For example, internet advertising will surely reach younger customers, young people and a large popular of the patients who could be looking for an innovative general practitioner. However, it will not get about half of the Baby Boomers, who will not own a laptop or Smartphone or a broad mainstream of elders. But countless sponsors usually start with the data that they have or can obtain and then determine which audience would be best served by the information. Whichever way, it is significant to create the correlation between the in a sequence you have and the folks who can use it.

Pathos

The editors begin by talking about the Affordable Care Act and the issues affecting it and at the same time appeal to the emotional connection of the reader in that they talk about the unfortunate experiences that people undergo due to the poor healthcare policies that are being formulated by the legislators. This mainly shows the empathy to the low-income earning families together with the high costs of medication that people incur when seeking medical services in private and government hospitals. However, as the writer continues with the article, he starts using the harsh tone that emphasizes on the need of having a quality system that offers the solution to the problems affecting the healthcare systems and makes affordable care to be accessible to more citizens.

"A Republican-led lawsuit that once seemed like a lark is threatening Obamacare protections for pre-existing conditions. And high out-of-pocket costs, absurd hospital billing practices, and ever-rising prescription of drug prices have forced too many people to skip crucial treatments, and avoid emergency rooms and ration the life-sustaining medications."

They portray an empathetic tone when sympathizing with the high costs that people have to incur to access healthcare because of the lawsuits that are threatening to cripple the current plan. However, for the rest of the article, the writers only use a serious tone to emphasize the need for a sound system and offer solutions that can help in making the systems affordable and accessible.

Logos

Similarly, the editors managed to build a logical appeal by using contrast to show the difference between Medicare for all by Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Debbie Stabenow's plan. Variation is critical in identifying the differences between their suggested courses of action, so within the article, it was useful for the authors to describe the two systems:

"Senator Bernie Sanders's Medicare for All Act would scrap private insurance and create a new federal system to cover everyone; a plan from the Center for American Progress, which is a think tank, that would create an optional public program that anyone could buy into; and a plan from Senator Debbie Stabenow would give all Americans the option to buy into Medicare when they turn 50. But these plans would extend their coverage to more people and would increase the federal government's role in providing and policing health insurance."

It is looking at the Senator Bernie Sanders's Medicare for All Act where he argues that the reasonable approach is to do away with the private insurance and adopt a single system that will go in covering every individual in the country. Through this approach, the government will be able to make healthcare affordable to all people across the nation, and this will be a great move towards making equal access to healthcare through improving the services of healthcare in the country.

Moreover, the authors of the article also bring out a critical and realistic approach to the strain of the Act. They begin by criticizing the amendments that have been made to the act as being discriminative. Towards the middle of the writer of the article, he talks about how to make the bill better and inclusive to all individuals. Towards the end of the report, the author now starts giving his reaction and ideas concerning the Act.

Besides, the editors of the article use statistic evidence to back up their main ideas. Authors in the paper use a hyperlink which directs the readers to external pages that contain information about the issues regarding the topic. For example, "In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, some 56 per cent of Americans, which is nearly a quarter of Republicans, supported the idea of a new federal program, but when trade-offs like higher taxes or the loss of private insurance options were factored in, that support evaporated." The statistics are logically there to support their claim that half of the US citizen supported the new type of healthcare. However, it is ridiculous that the writer refers to taxes that are only being a trade-off. Logos was also used to encourage the readers to do their outside research by making several hyphens and hyperlinks present throughout the text to link with external sites for additional data on a topic.

Additionally, the editors lean into logos by following a chronology of events where they develop the idea of how the damaged of the current system is, what can be done, the effects, and how to mitigate them. Importantly, the methods used to create room for concern and to conduct scrutiny into the system was by posing questions as to why the system has defects, as well as why a person chose one over the other. Similarly, the writers used narration to give a broad ideology of the topic. For example, "Most other countries use negotiating power to control health care costs; that's why the prescription of drugs cost so much less elsewhere than they do in the United States. But those countries accept a trade-off, inherent in this approach, which the United States has so far resisted."

Ethos

It is clear that detailed research has been done on the article's topic, making it highly informative. The writers, however, are not an acceptable authority on the subject. It is an opinion piece that is very informative, but purely for data purposes only. The article argues that the Affordable Care Act has problems that require solving, and the single-payer system will either crash the private insurance or raise taxes that will hurt the people. However, the only way that the article appeals to ethos is that it is well researched and written concerning the problem at hand.

Factual information regarding bills that have been tabled to Congress by different Senators has been included in the options section of the article. When putting their point across, the writers have used important information from the healthcare electorate concerns. Attention should now be focused on spreading the word as far as possible to see whether the suggested reforms are implemented.

Conclusion

It is clear that the authors are advocating for a fix for the current plan, which is flawed and outdated, as opposed to a new system; transparency of the system, as well to allow people to understand what is required and what is offered entirely, is crucial. Throughout the article, the authors used logos, pathos, chronology, tone, and factual evidence to prove their arguments. However, what they did not do was to include ethos in the essay at all, therefore not making as strong of a case as they could have. By adding ethos, the authors would have had more credibility in their analysis of the system and would have been able to offer a more effectively drawn to readers in. Even so, the authors were successful in illustrating their point that a long-term solution needs to be found that strikes a balance for both the legislation and the people.