Thinking Through Neg Arguments

At the core of this topic there seems to be two central questions that every aff is trying to answer. (Yes, there will be outliers)

1. How can the US healthcare system change to increase the access to healthcare for everyday individuals?

2. How can the US healthcare system change to lower the cost of healthcare? 

These two questions will probably dictate much of the uniqueness and link debate that happens throughout the season. Creative affs will try to steer clear of these questions, and Agressive affs will go head on to these questions. 

This leaves the negative with a fundemenal question. What should my 2NR look like. While I won't be speaking to necessarily the question of Kritiks. I did want to breiefly discuss some of the core negative arguments that teams could run, or at least, key points of departure for affirmatives to think about how to answer negative counterplans. 

The camp files seem to indicate some direction that the topic is going to go for a majority of teams (high level and repeative opponents will push the topic elsewhere). The first thing you notice about the camp files over at open evidence project is the counterplans. I think there are generally 

1. states counterplan. Questions whether the federal government is the entity that must implement HC reform, or if it can be done on the state level. 

2. Mulitpayer (Reinstate ACA, Public Option, Other countries models). These arguments seem to question the government monoply on healthcare and whether there should be market competition between insurance companies. 

3. Advantage CPs. These will question whether health insurance is even needed to solve for the aff impacts themselves. 

I think you will still hear things like the smokers pic produced by Michigan, and some other consult and condition counterplans. However, these usually don't have the same lasting power for an entire topic (when its a domestic topic). This is generally because there is a cap on how far you can go with these arguments. Eventually you will hit teams that can just out debate you on the permutation, especially when alot of judges think these counterplans are cheating. 

This brings us to disads. I think there are two core topic disads that are going to to be read, but will have various degrees of success as being net benefits to the above counterplans. 

1. Economy. This includes your stock market, consumer confidence, business confidence, capital flight, bonds, etc disads. 

2. Innovation- Mostly pharma and biotech. Plan crushes innovation by price negotiations bringing profits down extensively. 

I think there are a couple disads that have sneaky potential to be good net benefits. 

1. Doctor Shortages. Argues that doctor shortages aren't going to ruin the world now, plan would cause an increase in patients and overstress and under pays doctors causing them to quit. 

2. Doctor patient trust. Argues that the increased patient demand would lower appointment time with doctors and that lack of face to face time results in lowered trust and can cause patients to do silly things with their healthcare. 

3. Elections/Politics. There are good "doesn't link to the counterplan cards" to compliment the link cards. Very good recipe for being used as a net benefit. 

I think also, because the topic will result in one topical aff, that it can lend itself to case and a disad as a legitimate strat. I think, moreso than other years, this could result in affs eventually putting much more depth to their advantages at the sacrifice of the breadth of impacts. This seems an appropriate response to a topic where case debate becomes more focal.