The looming flu season has given good reason for most students to visit the clinics on campus. For people like me, a visit to any medical institution is rare and quite out of the ordinary. I avoid hospitals and clinics when I have the sniffles and decline the advice to take an aspirin for a headache, although when I get noticeably sick, I high-tail it down there to get some help.

Throughout my upbringing, my parents would bring me to the hospital based on the symptoms they saw. I now use the same criteria to determine the necessity of any medical establishment. This relationship between my parents’ diagnoses and my current diagnoses brings me to an assumption that drives my view over health care.

Universal health care takes the point of sale cost of medical services and goods away from the general public. The government simply brushes the costs under the carpet so that we clean it all up all together with taxes or government borrowing. Without the market prices on medical goods and services, nothing — besides the cost of travel — prevents parents from trafficking back and forth from the hospitals for even the slightest cough or headache.

Once parents take their children more often to the medical institutions for symptoms we consider trivial, it will convince their children — like me — to consider those trivial symptoms worthy of the comment, “Well, I should get checked by a doctor — just in case.”

Just in case of what? It will not matter what the sickness could be, it will matter that there could be any sickness at all.

I think this indoctrination of parents will lead to a “hypochondriactic demand shift,” which should have a multiplier effect. The first generation of parents in a universal health care system will visit the doctors more often because the point of sale cost will be gone. The health care culture will gradually change through the subsequent generations leading them to visit the doctor’s office more and more for trivial instances.

Maybe this is good. Maybe we want people to flood the hospital, “just in case.” No, I do not want that. The couple of times I will probably go to the hospital, I expect full attention from my doctor to solve the medical problem I have. With the increased demand to the medical field, my doctor’s attention will be divided even more so than it is now.

If it is not divided, it will be a result of the government’s willingness to pay for the expansion of the medical field to accommodate for increased demand. The government can either increase our taxes initially or eventually, or it can pay lower than the current market price for medical goods and services, which could cause a brain drain of the American medical field.

I do not nitpick, like some do, over the Obama universal health care plan or the European universal health care plan. We should have a market point of sale price on medical goods and services. What better way to prevent us from becoming a hypochondriatic nation?