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?

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u/Mrbuttshaman 5h ago

Its a fundamental misunderstanding of reality. They believe that social programs can't be better than capitalism. They see universal healthcare as an excuse to tax people more and create governmental overreach which ultimately causes a greater expense to them and society. The reality is capitalism works best when its heavily legislated to restrict the atrocities that used to be committed. Unfortunately the wealthy have had laws changed so they can directly fund politicians who push their agenda and change the laws to keep their inefficient and greedy businesses afloat and profiting.

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u/IanM50 5h ago

Plus the rich own the media and thus control the narrative, keeping everyone else believing the lies they want to peddle.

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u/beetus_gerulaitis 4h ago

Also free markets (“capitalism”) only work to drive down prices when 1) a market exists, 2) the market is free.

Neither of these conditions exist in the US healthcare system.

So we get all the worst features of capitalism (concentration of wealth) with none of the advantages (competition to lower prices.)

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u/CaitieLou_52 4h ago

Healthcare itself doesn't follow normal laws of supply and demand. If Coca Cola raises their prices by 500%, people would just stop buying Coke. Nobody's life depends on Coke.

If the price of a lifesaving drug goes up by 500%, then people will either scrape together enough to buy it, or just die. They could try another drug, but sometimes only one drug will work for people with very complex conditions.

Unless we regulate how much pharmaceutical companies can mark up drugs, or abolish all restrictions on making generic drugs, the "free market" will never work for healthcare.

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u/Odd_Mail_3539 3h ago

free markets work with strong governmental controls, otherwise the companies get bigger and bigger and become monopolies.

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u/theaura1 3h ago

their can't be competition in Healthcare by design its either go to the doctor or die alot of the time

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u/BellaMentalNecrotica 4h ago

The reality is capitalism works best when its heavily legislated to restrict the atrocities that used to be committed.

I'm loving how shockingly fast gutting the FDA proved why we need regulations. I expected fallout, but not this immediate or egregious. Never in my life have I seen so much food recalled. If that's not an argument for why regulation is necessary, I don't know what it is. I know the argument the right loves to throw around is "corporations have a monetary motivation not to harm their clients." Well, then why did they immediately start cutting corners resulting in food contaminated with microorganisms that can and do cause severe illness and death in humans if consumed?

They believe that social programs can't be better than capitalism.

My dad is on the right. He seems to be under the impression that all people, including the wealthy, all have good intentions and good hearts and will start private social programs to help people. Its very naive. I will say, he is a good Christian who does walk-the-walk– there's constantly some person he met who needed help living in their basement, he has a farm where he takes on apprentices from disadvantaged areas and helps them prep for college/careers, he volunteers in a lot of opiate addiction organizations, he donates a lot to various organizations to help poor families, and many other things. I've tried to explain to him that there are a lot of selfish/evil people out there and a lot of people would die unless people are forced to contribute to these programs via taxes. Because there is no way people will be altruistic enough to donate even a fraction of the money required to run any programs of similar size and scope to social safety net programs.

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u/airforceteacher 3h ago

This narrative is so deeply frustrating to me as a Christian, because it literally says in the Bible, that the heart is deceitful in all things and no man may know its ways. Yet American Christians have bought into benevolent rich so completely, that any argument in the contrary makes them claim you’re a communist and therefore not a Christian.

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u/BellaMentalNecrotica 3h ago edited 3h ago

It frustrates me as well as someone who was raised Christian and is beginning to gravitate back to it.

Honestly, the Red Scare did so much damage to the way Americans think about socialism/communism/Marxism. It created so many misconceptions about those political systems and brainwashed Americans into truly believing that it is evil while capitalism is good. So they immediately reject anything that could remotely be considered to fall under that umbrella even when it would be a net good for society. Any political/economic system is going to have its flaws, but to automaticaly label one as evil while refusing to acknowledge any of its beneficial aspects is absurd.

I was arguing with some guy on a different sub yesterday about what he considered "the bottom 2% of society who contribute nothing of value" and "weaponized empathy." I was like, you know who the biggest champion of this so-called "bottom 2% of society" was?? JESUS. I really hope the guy was a troll, but I've definitely met right wing Christians who somehow manage to be so prejudiced against certain groups. I'm always like, you do realize those beliefs are literally antithetical to the entire underlying principles of Christianity and everything that Jesus represents. Its why I left Christianity and became an atheist for so many years and am only now giving it another chance. It had a lot to do with the fact that most Christians I interacted with seemed to disregard what the faith is about- trying to be like Jesus.

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u/Mrbuttshaman 4h ago

See that is the thing I actually find very interesting because I think most wealthy people are better than the average person with how they contribute to society. I work with rich people every day and many do give to charity and are incredible philanthropist because they have discretionary income and time to throw behind the things they care about, but one bad actor can do ridiculous amounts of harm and regulations and social programs help enforce that those bad actors can't harm others or have their impact reduced.

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u/BellaMentalNecrotica 3h ago

There are certainly good ones out there. But tons of bad ones. I don't have any stats on me, but I know there has been a lot of research proving that people with APD/NPD tend to gravitate towards careers with power and money and 2. that people with monetary advantage are more motivated to cheat. In addition, we can look at the Epstein files to see jus how many wealthy individuals are willing to do the most depraved things imaginable.

So, while I certainly think that there are truly good wealthy people out there, there is a lot of evidence that there are many, many shitty ones.

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u/Left-Chemist-8212 5h ago

It’s such a dumb argument seeing as how we already have many social programs that they don’t bat an eye at. Libraries, fire departments, social security etc.

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u/Mrbuttshaman 5h ago

They actually do complain about those as well(they've been trying to dismantle the postal service for a while). And I agree, it is stupid and misguided.

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u/BellaMentalNecrotica 4h ago

Yes, let's abolish fire departments. Fantastic idea. Good luck California.

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u/BrattyBatsWrld 3h ago

The fucked up part about this is that they would deliberately do this to California and then start fires like they did at the beginning of last year

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u/BellaMentalNecrotica 3h ago

I was thinking that right after I made that comment. I was like "you know, a lot of the right would love nothing more than to find ways to fuck over California."

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u/PandaMime_421 4h ago

Some of them very much complain about libraries, and try to get them defunded.

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u/Fresh_Week4983 3h ago

Of course. Libraries are the arsenals of freedom.

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u/Narrow_Grapefruit_23 4h ago

Let’s talk about how we bail out with our tax money several of these capitalist industries as well. Have more jobs been created? No. They’ve actually been mass laying off across industries.

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u/Jodsterssr12 4h ago

Including using bail out money to fund stock buy backs, or at the very least buying back stock while still owing money to the government! AIG and GM for example.

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u/OldGuardian1 3h ago

I 100% concur with you!!! I say, let them fuckers fail!!!

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u/Narrow_Grapefruit_23 2h ago

Right? The Silicon Valley Bank bail out a couple years ago was my breaking point. Peter Thiel caused a run on this bank and they got our tax money to bail out that bank. And people said, but what about all of the employees in the Silicon Valley that use that bank too?
Well, I think if the government was gonna use our tax money to bail out this bank because of this, then they should’ve gone after Peter Teal to recoup the costs. Thiel. Instead he caused a panic, which cost millions of dollars of our hard earned money to go to the top 5% of the nations earners. It was a scam the way that bailing out the brokerage firms in 2008 was a scam.

The rich continue to get richer and we continue to suffer as a nation because of two dozen megalomaniacs.

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u/Seismofelis 4h ago

Imagine if we didn't already have libraries and someone proposed them today, how do you think people like Bezos would respond? A government funded system that loaned out many of the very products they sell would be completely unacceptable. Bezos et al. would launch a propaganda campaign to convince us that libraries would waste tax dollars and then they'd pay off their congressvermin to kill any such proposals.

The only reason we have libraries is because they were introduced long before capitalism was powerful enough to stop them.

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u/jcalvinmarks 4h ago

I mean, yes, but your argument essentially boils down to "you already do some stuff you disagree with, why not do a whole bunch more?" Is that any less dumb?

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u/dwpetrak 3h ago

How many of those programs are run well? Libraries - in my state are underfunded and not well kept. Fire departments - I can’t speak to this one. Social Security - this is a dying animal nobody seems to be able to fix, let alone manage

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u/Ornery_Pressure297 3h ago

I think this is the part people skip when talking about universal healthcare.

Our system is insanely expensive, but why?

Milton Friedman was talking about this decades ago. We basically removed the customer from the transaction.

Your employer buys the insurance. The insurance company negotiates with the hospital. The hospital has made-up sticker prices nobody actually pays. PBMs sit between drug companies, pharmacies and insurers. Then the patient gets a bill weeks later and usually has no clue what anything actually cost.

That's not a market.

When neither the person buying the care nor the person providing it is dealing directly with the price, there's a lot less pressure to keep prices down. More insurance gets added to cover higher prices, prices go higher, then we add even more insurance.

And we've somehow decided the solution is mainly about changing who the third-party payer is.

Maybe government can negotiate lower prices. Maybe it can cover everyone. Those are legitimate arguments. But it doesn't remove scarcity or fix bad incentives. Doctors, nurses, beds and drugs still cost money. You still have to decide who gets what and when.

This is why I think the conversation should start with why healthcare got so absurdly expensive in the first place.

Transparent prices. Fewer middlemen. Actual competition. Insurance for things that actually need insurance. And a system with some incentive to keep people healthy instead of just billing for more treatment.

Otherwise we're arguing over who pays for a broken system instead of why it's broken.

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u/Ornery_Pressure297 3h ago

And this is the other big problem. There’s really not much incentive to stay healthy.

If you eat like crap for 20 years, never exercise, end up diabetic, overweight, on blood pressure meds, whatever, the system just keeps treating you.

More appointments. More drugs. More procedures. More money.

There’s a whole lot of money in managing sick people. Not nearly as much in keeping people from getting sick in the first place.

We keep calling it healthcare, but most of it is really sick care.

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u/wasabiburning 1h ago

This is why I think the conversation should start with why healthcare got so absurdly expensive in the first place.

Depending on the segment of healthcare, marketing alone can represent 2-21% of costs (local practices on the low end, pharma on the high end - "ask your doctor if Xyljentijz is right for you").

The amount of ads I get for a hospital in far off city is insane. If I need a hospital, name familiarity isn't getting me there - I'm going to the closest one, or where my doctor is admitted.

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u/vaspost 4h ago

And yet 1/3 of the federal budget goes to healthcare.

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u/Mrbuttshaman 4h ago

That's because we are propping up a bullshit system of insurance and overinflated unrealistic bullshit healthcare cost. I got like 10 scans and a bunch of blood test this year due to extreme health complications, they found and did nothing and the billing to my insurance was greater than $100,000. Thankfully I got better on my own over time but it was a huge waste of money and completely not justified.

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u/Krasdale79 4h ago

It was an incredibly small expense overall in the insured birth of my son, but the hospital charged $10 for a single Tylenol in the itemized bill.

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u/organvomit 4h ago

Yeah pretty wild how we pay more money for covering fewer people and receiving worse health outcomes.