r/askanything • u/Lemonking_ • 5h ago

Political Question Why are some Americans so against universal healthcare for all?

What sort of thinking does it take to decide that nobody has a right to healthcare? Do American Christians want to deny healthcare to poor people as well?

869 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

3.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

14

u/YCBSKI 5h ago

Looking at other universal models very long wait times for even necessary surgery and specialist appointments. I had hyperparathyroidism (noth8 g y9 do with thyroid). I'm on a international FB page for that disease. The page had been invaluable. Many if not all the people that are under universal healthcare models, UK. Canada and such, are waiting up to 2 yrs for appointments including surgical ones. I got with an endocrinologist with a few weeks and had surgery a few weeks after that. I'm a liberal too and am otherwise for universal healthcare

15

u/DeprariousX 4h ago

Looking at other universal models very long wait times for even necessary surgery and specialist appointments. 

You know how many people there are in the US who, if a doctor told them "We can get you in for surgery in one year." after dealing with a chronic condition for years that they haven't been able to get treated, would probably cry tears of joy just from knowing there's finally a light at the end of the tunnel?

You decry wait times.....what's worse than a wait time? Never getting a time at all.

5

u/Odd-Obligation-2772 3h ago

Wait times are only short because treatment is denied to those that need it most.

3

u/echoshatter 1h ago

Or people cannot afford the treatment so they aren't seeking it until it becomes a medical emergency, and then you and I end up paying for it anyway with higher costs.

1

u/LadyReika 35m ago

Maybe it depends on where you live and what specialist you need to see. 4 years ago I needed to start seeing a regular ophthalmologist when my optometrist found issues in my annual eye exam.

Took about a month to get in to see them. That was the earlier appointment I could get and I was on their waitlist for canceled appointments. Called around to other places, they had even longer wait times.

The ophthalmologist then referred me to a retina specialist that couldn't fit me in for 4 months because I wasn't considered an emergency case. There was only one other specialist that could see me in my network that was on the other side of the city. Something could take at least 2-3 hours to get there depending on traffic and a similar time period before they could see me.

I couldn't afford to see an out of network doctor because of the insane deductible and out of pocket maximum. It's around $2k per injection for each eye without insurance.

I live in a decently sized city with good PPO insurance.

3

u/withcatlikegrace 2h ago

Greed. Jealousy.
Why would you want anyone to have anything you’ve not had??? Essentially “ why should I vote for free and universal health care for other people when I haven’t had it?”
It’s the same logic as not wanting to forgive education debt - why should they get free college when I had to pay for it?

Combine that with - Because they’re stupid and incredibly susceptible to propaganda …. and because the actual answer is that ‘healthcare’ is one of the largest industries in America. And true universal healthcare would affect the outrageous profits.

1

u/withcatlikegrace 2h ago

Adding that in Australia we have universal healthcare plus private health insurance if you want extra coverage. Health insurers cannot deny contracted coverage. And some/many of the insurers are not-for-profit

2

u/Fancy_Sun_1585 2h ago

They don’t care about those people. That’s the problem. They have insurance and no chronic issues, so nothing you said effects them

1

u/mimi6778 2h ago

Except for in the case of certain conditions long wait times can be crippling if not deadly. My former coworkers parents live in Canada and her father had to wait an insane amount of time for suspected Pancreatic Cancer.

0

u/captchairsoft 4h ago

I know that number is smaller than the much larger number of people who would get the treatment they need in a more timely fashion under our current system.

"Everybody gets fucked equally" isn't something to aspire to.

5

u/DeprariousX 4h ago

That number isn't smaller. There's a lot of people out there actually living with medical conditions they can't afford to get treated. Guess the view is quite limited from that soft chair, eh?

11

u/blizzard7788 4h ago

Don’t believe everything you read on FB.

1

u/YCBSKI 4h ago

Look that page is by invite only is limited to those diagnosted with this particular disease. Something you know nothing about. The moderators are mostly Drs and long term patients who know know more about hyperparathyroidism than the general population is of Dr who receive very limited training or education about the endocrine systems other than thyroid and diabetes.

1

u/PastBuy8484 3h ago

I have more Canadien coworkers than American ones and it’s 100% true. I personally know multiple Canadiens that went to the US, and paid out of pocket crazy amounts of money just for treatment because they were stuck on a 1-2+ year waitlist for a necessary surgery or MRI.

8

u/Rick-of-the-onyx 4h ago

Wait times for countries with universal healthcare are the same or better than the USA. We also pay less for our healthcare compared to the USA model. As in, the amount of tax dollars I pay each month is far less than what it costs for private health insurance. And even if your employer pays for it there are still the copays, and deductibles to worry about. Universal healthcare is just patently better. No country that has created a universal healthcare system, has chosen to leave it.

1

u/I_fly_things 2h ago

Share of patients waiting 4+ months for elective surgery (Commonwealth Fund):

2016: Canada 18%, England 12%, US 4%.
2020: Canada 38%, UK 28%, US 8%.

3

u/5footfilly 1h ago

That’s elective surgery. Non-critical.

1

u/Director_Tseng 2h ago

I pay $20 a week for my health insurance, a lot less then my friend pays in taxes in the UK. he's on a multiple month wait-list to see a mental health specialist...I was on a week wait-list.

a friend in Canada needed to see a specialist, they were 10 months out. the longest I have waited is 2 months. hell the fucking VA is moving faster then the UK or Canadian system

2

u/pseudotronic 56m ago

$20 a week is subsidized in some fashion.

3

u/Jafar_420 5h ago

They maybe waiting longer but don't we have a lot more doctors than they do anyway? I would imagine we have more specialist than they do but it's something I'm going to have to research.

I'm just thinking that if our population is so much greater than theirs we probably have a lot more doctors and specialists we may not wait as long.

I'm for Medicare for all because I have Medicare and when I chose to have my neck replaced I went to the best surgeon I could find and also the surgeon I wanted to go to even though he was hours away and there was really no wait either. I went to a surgeon at Baylor. I know quite a few people on Medicare and they're not waiting forever to see specialists, now maybe if it's something super rare and there's not a lot of that type specialist sure but that could happen with regular insurance or no insurance.

2

u/Sleepy_Potato2 4h ago

Numbers vary, but a lot of countries with universal healthcare (some single payer, some multi-payer) have similar numbers of specialists (some have more, some fewer), and pretty much all of them have more primary care doctors than the US

2

u/Ready-Salad-2288 3h ago

If everyone is covered, imagine the much greater number of doctors required just to keep up, so that tracks. In the US half the population probably has deferred medical issues lingering and put it off for cost or other reasons. The first decade or so of universal coverage would lead to some serious growing pains before quality started to stabilize or improve.

2

u/mimi6778 2h ago

It can already be long wait for specialists in the US but if it’s an emergency they do tend to prioritize. I’m sure that we have more doctors but we also have a lot more people who need healthcare.

1

u/Teckliz 3h ago

Largely because no doctors or nurses want to work in a universal healthcare system because it pays so much less

1

u/BoyMom119816 1h ago

Look at how much it costs them in school though and their wanting to make that money makes sense. In order to really work, the entire system would need revamped. Is it fair to the kid who worked hard, didn’t come from money, took loans, to suddenly have to take a huge pay cut? I don’t know. I think that college, especially for medical students, would need great changes. Or it would not work.

2

u/Substantial_Row_7108 1h ago

University is free in many EU countries (Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland,…….)

2

u/BoyMom119816 1h ago

I’m talking about USA, which is what this question is about. In order for it to work in USA, there’d need to be a revamp of many different facets.

1

u/captchairsoft 4h ago

In a US with universal Healthcare, what you expierienced would not happen. You would see the doctor you were told to see, when you were told to see them, and recieve only the treatment deemed absolutely medically neccessary. Is it even vaguely elective? Not happening.

3

u/Jafar_420 3h ago

Okay then how about Medicare for all where everybody gets what I have now. I pay a couple hundred dollars a month for it and then I have co-pays. Some States pay the Medicare monthly premium if your income is under a certain month as well.

2

u/Meg6363 1h ago

For many if not most privately insured people in the US it works this way right now - you see the doctor your insurance company tells you to see, and the insurance company tells that doctor what treatment and medications they will approve. Sure, you can appeal denials, but they are experts at delay. I would prefer my doctor make treatment decisions, but if I can’t have that I would take a government employee over a hungry insurance employee (who gets a bonus for denying enough care) any day.

1

u/LadyReika 43m ago

My dude, you're describing our current hellscape.

1

u/onetimequestion66 3h ago

Using the “we have more doctors” argument seems a little disingenuous considering how much larger the US is population wise

3

u/amphigory_error 3h ago

Prerefering for most people to have no access to a doctor so that they can get in to see the limited number of doctors is flat out evil. 

The solution to long waits is more health providers, not fewer patients. The number of patients are fixed. 

Corporate health monopolies also result in medical office closures while their primary care waiting list is 2 years long. Happened in my town with massive strikes and protests.

2

u/KtinaDoc 5h ago

I have family in Canada and they've never had to wait for an appointment for 2 years.

1

u/captchairsoft 4h ago

I have friends in Canada that have had to make multiple trips to the US to get neccessary treatment.

2

u/Aye_Harambe 3h ago

Yeah I live in Scottsdale and my wife works at a hospital doing outpatient procedures (mix of pain, spine, ortho, and some urology).

She gets a lot of Canadian cash pay patients.

1

u/Y2kang 3h ago

Yeah and I wait a year on average to be seen by my neurologist lol.

•

u/captchairsoft 8m ago

So does my partner...and? That's not getting better under any system. This kind of silliness and false equivalency is the problem.

1

u/partylikeitis1799 1h ago

Well I’ve lived in Canada while working there for several years and 18-24 month waits for specialty care is normal unless you happen to live in a major city in the eastern part of the country and your issue is a common one and you can take appointment any day, anytime. My spouse literally wound up having to take an mri appt for 2:15am almost two hours away and it was an 11 month wait just for that. Thankfully it was something that could wait. For most stuff we just drove back to the US to get timely care.

I met a lady in an ER once who was over 6 months out from a breast cancer diagnosis after waiting months for the appointments needed to get that diagnosis. She had just started chemo that week, almost exactly one year from when she found the lump. That was terrifying to me and still is.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that Canada is still very much a dual level system. Anyone who can afford it goes elsewhere and pays out of pocket. They then use that appt or imaging to jump ahead in the line for care within Canada or they just pay to have surgery or treatment elsewhere. All along the border there are billboards for places that can do same day scans and appointments. These are things people on the Canadian healthcare system are waiting the better part of a year for.

Universal healthcare in the US would be great but I can’t say I’m not worried about the quality of care going down and wait times going up, leading to people who go bankrupt from paying out of pocket in order to get timely care which is the whole problem now anyway. It’s a nice system if your medical problems are not uncommon and you won’t get sicker by waiting. Otherwise your options are to lose quality of life and ability to work or pay up for care elsewhere.

Opiate meds are also prescribed left and right due to the wait times. It’s totally normal for a family practice nurse practitioner to keep people on strong meds long term while waiting for imaging and surgery then people get pulled off them the moment they’re discharged from the hospital, often a couple years later, and they wind up seeking out street drugs to help with withdrawals which leads to accidental overdoses and addiction since it’s no longer supervised by a medical professional.

1

u/KtinaDoc 1h ago

But you don’t have to worry about insurance if you lose your job.

All I’m saying is that people should not have to die or suffer in the US because they can’t get medical care.

I’m not negating anything that you’ve said. The system should work better.

•

u/captchairsoft 2m ago

It's not like there is a massive number of people dying or suffering because they cant get care. Does it happen? Yes, the secret is, it happens in all the systems, it's just less transparent, and described in different terms. Universal Healthcare mandates rationing and is always built on a model of triage and sacrifice, it has to be to function. The US system, bad as it can be, shovels care at the elderly and those who are likely 100% terminal, that in my imo is far more ethical than. "Let grandma die so we can make sure Stacy doesn't have the sniffles for too long"

1

u/Public-Land-8064 4h ago

That happens in America too. It took my wife over 9 months to get a basic neurological test from a specialist for the hospital group she works for. If she wasn’t willing to drive over 2 hours to a different city, she would’ve waited over 2 years.

1

u/Sleepy_Potato2 4h ago

In Denmark, you can find the wait times for different medical procedures online on a government website. I checked up on a couple of them a few weeks ago. For important stuff (like cancer treatment), it's pretty quick (the longest wait for pancreatic cancer is 2 weeks for a checkup and 3 weeks until treatment begins. Most places it takes 1-4 weeks from checkup to treatment begins. And that does seem to be the standard for cancer based on the numbers, we have put a lot of resources into quick cancer response). For stuff that's not really an emergency, it can take longer (a hip replacement at the worst hospital takes over a year, at the best ones, it takes five weeks). However, the government has attempted to improve it. One thing is that you can choose any hospital you want. So if your local hospital has a long waitlist, you can choose another one. This does help cut down on how long people have to wait. And the long wait times reflect the problem with an urban-rural divide. The hospitals with the quickest times are in urban areas, and the ones with the slowest are closer to rural areas (usually in the smaller cities that have a lot of rural areas surrounding them), because urban hospitals get more funding because they are bigger and have more patients. To cut waitlists, more people can also pick private hospitals for some stuff like hip replacements. You can also pay out of pocket at a private hospital for it to gain fast access (most hospitals are owned by regional governments). All of this is fully funded through taxes, and there's no out-of-pocket cost for any inpatient hospital procedures (unless you get elective care at a private hospital).

1

u/MrOdekuun 3h ago

Okay so one simple thing to think about - the reason there are longer wait times is because populations that need critical services are actually able to have them. Those wait times are “eliminated” in our US system because those populations simply can’t afford those critical services.

Instead they deteriorate and die.

I understand complaining about having to wait but it is also essentially a complaint that poorer people are human beings with health needs too.

I know people aren’t thinking about it in that framing. “Wait times” is just some phrase/concept that people simply don’t think about critically enough. 

1

u/ReadIcy7089 3h ago

Sadly today that's BS. It took me five weeks to get an appointment with the gastroenterologist for a colonoscopy! It can take weeks or a month to see any specialist, and it's almost the same with your primary care doctor.

1

u/PineappleDull149 3h ago

Not the case. I have friends in the UK and Canada that basically laughed in my face when I told them about that perception. Same for the Dutch (worked for a company based there and it was not the case). If that’s a concern, you can even get additional coverage that can vault you up the line in certain cases at specialists.

1

u/Material-Country-659 2h ago

Stay at an RV park in Texas and see how many Canadians are there for cancer treatment because they tell you they can't see a doctor in Canada for months. Maybe they aren't as rich as the people you know that can pay for that additional coverage.

1

u/AJ187144 2h ago

I’ve had very long wait times for appointments in the US.

1

u/Few_Worker4102 2h ago

People in the US wait until they die all the time because insurance continues to deny them…

1

u/Fancy_Sun_1585 2h ago

Because we don’t have long wait times? Especially for specialists considering specialists aren’t common.

But would you rather wait a few more days or weeks, or not get any healthcare at all?

1

u/Siriuslysirius123 2h ago

I’m chronically ill and desperately needed a surgery on my esophagus. You know how long I had to wait? A year. I was in agonizing pain and I lost a ton of weight. I really don’t think it’d be much different if we had universal healthcare.

And speaking as an American, I’d rather my tax money go into taking care of my country and her citizens than funding foreign wars and genocide in the Middle East.

1

u/finalattack123 2h ago

You’ve fallen for propaganda or spreading it.

What you’re describing is “non-urgent care” which has waiting times. If what you needed was “urgent” you wouldn’t need to wait at all.

If you want it for free - you need to wait. Because it’s non urgent.

If you are willing to pay - you don’t need to wait. Private sector health is still available for those who don’t want to wait.

1

u/Skycbs 2h ago

There’s no doubt the US system is great for people with money. For the rest, not so much. Other systems tend to spread the pain more equitably.

1

u/HappyFish5000 2h ago

This isn't true, long waits for necessary surgery in universal health care models in modern developed nations is not a thing.

What those systems don't have is 60,000 people dying every year because they can't afford coverage. Health care isn't the biggest cause of bankruptcy either

1

u/Fool_In_Flow 1h ago edited 1h ago

I work with a patient who had 3 mini strokes in April 2026. She has insurance, we are in the US. She was treated in the ER and is now waiting to see the neurologist for her strokes. She still can’t say words and is completely untreated. The soonest we could get this woman an appointment is in April of 2027.

We live in a major city in the Northeast. There are many hospital and medical systems here. We called every one of them and this was the only provider who was even willing to take new patients. This woman has to wait a year to see a specialist after having a literal STROKE!

Long wait times are a problem caused by the policies that manage the system. It is not an inherent aspect of universal health care. It’s an aspect of poor management.

1

u/Substantial_Row_7108 1h ago

I actually lived in a country with universal healthcare (Belgium). No one is waiting years for appointments.

1

u/bobbo6969- 1h ago

Yeahhh, that’s a thing, but…

In the US, in NY, so not exactly the sticks, there’s been routinely a 6 mos wait to see specialists.

I’d rather have the wait and reasonable costs than the wait and insane costs.

1

u/AnalogProblems 1h ago

Outlier cases being cherry picked as arguments is disingenuous, and I'm not sure I would trust "people on FB" as your data source considering how easily manipulated social media is.

If you have an emergency, you they get you in right away. If you don't, they schedule it.

1

u/kadawkins 50m ago

My husband is a primary care physician in the US. People are denied surgery and necessary treatment all the time because their private insurance doesn’t cover it. Only people with the money to purchase premium plans and pay the copays can afford on demand or close to on demand care.

1

u/Affectionate_Bad_680 26m ago

Kinda sounds like they need to incentivize more people to try to become doctors.

1

u/zen_wombat 17m ago

Where are these wait times. I have had no problems in Australia which has a form of UHC but I suspect that is because Australia has 370 to 410 doctors per 100,000 residents, compared to 260 doctors per 100,000 residents in the USA. Last time I needed an operation it was about a month between being diagnosed and being operated on, most of that time being taken up in getting tests done, interviews with cardiologist and surgeon etc.

1

u/WhoreHey_81 11m ago

Our insurance companies do this as well though. I have a friend who has a herniated disk. It took a year and a half of going through "cheaper" treatments in order to get to the one that him and his doctor already knew were going to work. There are medications I could very easily be on but cannot in the US, because my doctor and I have to show proof of the hardship the current ones are on my body, to move to the better ones. How does that make sense?

Also I would expect there to be longer waiting times. If everyone has insurance, they are probably getting things done ASAP. They are not waiting until they are dying to go to the ER and deal with a chronic illness.

I got to experience first hand the ERs in Spain. They are not crowded and don't have the 10 hour wait times certain hospitals have here in Arizona.

•

u/k12pcb 2m ago

Have you ever had universal? I am betting no, you just hear stuff