America’s healthcare system in its current condition is a complete and utter nightmare. So long as you’re a human being, you’ll require medical attention at various points in your life.

Unfortunately, Americans currently live in a society where Martin Shkreli can skyrocket the price of the six-decade-old medication Daraprim, used by AIDs patients, by over 5,000 percent (from $13.50 to $750 per dose). According to BBC News, the price to manufacture the drug is only about $1. It’s beyond unethical for our society to run a healthcare system that prioritizes the exploitation of sick patients for the sake of profit.

A Medicare-For-All plan is the best possible alternative to the current expensive and inaccessible healthcare crisis, which not only would allow every American to finally clinch their fundamental right to healthcare, but would make healthcare more affordable to our nation altogether.

Medicare has emerged as one of the most popular federal programs in its five-decade history. However, Medicare is a single-payer system that only finances healthcare for Americans age 65 or older (with a few exceptions). For the rest of us Americans, living in the largest economy on the planet, healthcare must be sought out through the insurance industry.

A “lack of health insurance is associated with as many as 44,789 deaths per year,” Harvard researchers found in 2009. Note that 27 million Americans remain uninsured under the current system.

It’s astonishing to comprehend how the U.S., an economic powerhouse that once led the world in advancing the living conditions of its society, has fallen dramatically behind the rest of the developed world in guaranteeing its people the basic right to healthcare.

A Medicare-For-All system is unquestionably both more ethical and more affordable. Overall, a single-payer will actually slash the administrative waste of healthcare rather than increase it. Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, estimates a single-payer system would save the U.S. $592 billion a year by cutting the administrative waste of the healthcare insurance industry and by matching the pharmaceutical prices of our European counterparts.

The healthcare insurance industry adds unnecessary management to one of the most basic human rights. Granted, the free market can improve people’s lives in many arenas, but not when the market being capitalized on is that of the sick and the diseased. A staggering number of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck without room in their books for consistent insurance subscriptions. Americans that do find themselves fortunate enough to have insurance plans often become burdened with out-of-pocket costs and hospital fees due to unexpected sicknesses or unforeseeable accidents.

Any concerns about how the nation will fit Medicare-For-All into its budget must look at what we’re paying for right now. Private health insurance appropriates 11.7 percent of their premiums toward administrative cost, according the American Medical Association, which compares to just 6.3 percent spent by public healthcare systems. Outside of the insurance industry’s madness is the price gouging of prescription medicines by pharmaceutical giants and patient services by hospitals themselves.

“When we look across a broad range of hospital services (both medical and surgical), the average price in the United States is 85 percent higher than the average in other OECD countries,” according to researcher Mark Pearson, head of Division on Health Policy at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in a PBS article.

Incorporating Medicare to work for all Americans would mean physicians could devote medical attention to your health’s best interest, not what your insurance plan is willing to cover. It would mean no family must drown in bankruptcy from co-payments and deductibles. It would mean an American society where the odds that one survives unanticipated disease are not determined by the shininess of their jewelry. Medicare-For-All stops making sickness a crime.

The Daily Evergreen opinion editor reached out to the WSU College Republicans with the opportunity to participate in this head-to-head discussion. They did not meet the previously agreed upon deadline.