Dr. Schilling: Those who advocate replacing my country’s private health insurance system with nationalized health insurance because of the rising costs of medical care fail to consider the high human costs that consumers pay in countries with nationalized insurance: access to high-technology medicine is restricted. Kidney transplants and open-heart surgery—familiar life-saving procedures—are rationed. People are denied their right to treatments they want and need.

Dr. Laforte: Your country’s reliance on private health insurance denies access even to basic, conventional medicine to the many people who cannot afford adequate health coverage. With nationalized insurance, rich and poor have equal access to life-saving medical procedures. And people’s right to decent medical treatment regardless of income is not violated.

In responding to Dr. Schillihng, Dr. Laforte employs which one of the following argumentative strategies?


(A) showing that the objections raised by Dr. Schilling have no bearing on the question of which of the two systems under consideration is the superior system

(B) calling into question Dr. Schilling’s status as an authority on the issue of whether consumers’ access to medical treatments is restricted in countries with nationalized health insurance

(C) producing counterexamples to Dr. Schilling’s claims that nationalized health insurance schemes extract high human costs from consumers

(D) demonstrating that Dr. Schilling’s reasoning is persuasive only because of his ambiguous use of the key word “consumer”

(E) showing that the force of Dr. Schilling’s criticism depends on construing the key notion of access in a particular limited way
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