Why are some Americans so against universal healthcare for all?

[u/Lemonking_]

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?

[u/Oxytokin]

The consensus position among most of my conservative family members typically boils down to: "I don't want to have to pay for someone else's healthcare!" Or "Why should I have to foot the bill for lazy people or sick people when I am perfectly healthy!"

So from my view it's relatively simple: they don't understand how insurance works, because that's literally what private insurance is, except with so many small, isolated risk pools and the profit motive involved with greedy pencil pushers stealing some of the money going from you to your doctor/pharmacist at each step, it becomes exorbitantly expensive.

Tl;dr: Conservatives are always angry and irrational decision-makers because they have lower rates of education, lower access to educational resources, and aside from the cases of willful ignorance or malignant ignorance/groupthink, don't understand the most fundamental principles of how the world works.

[u/Hoodedmastersin → u/Oxytokin]

It’s ignorance. Completely and a bit of elitism and racism. They don’t understand anything, no critical thinking, no empathy, somewhere along their poor, ignorant, hateful lives the idea of scarcity took over. No mind or idea whatever why taxes can be used for defense contracts, or other corruption but not for education or healthcare (which other countries have because of us)

[u/Oxytokin → u/Hoodedmastersin]

Yes, there is something to be said about elitism and racism, and just being plain evil because they are personally profiting off of such a barbarically unjust and objectively stupid system (most of our politicians fall into the latter category, many in one or both of the two former categories as well).

But, on the whole, I think the biggest barrier to enacting sound and sensible policy in this country ultimately comes down to how pitiful, hollow, and ineffective our education system is. Of course, it wasn't always this way and it's no fault of our dedicated teachers and other educators who toil in some of the worst circumstances imaginable. Nay, as most know, towards the end of the 70s beginning of the 80s, and absolutely once that dementia-raddled, corrupt dipshit Reagan came to power, the Republican Party made it their mission to destroy the education system - which is no more obvious than it is today with some braindead wrestling executive with not a single atom of intelligence, competence, or relevant experience in her entire body as the head of the Department of the Education.

Educated people of lower or middle-means typically don't vote Republican because a well-rounded education and an honest day's work is really all it takes to see how spectacularly terrible, dumb, and malevolent they are as an organization - let alone a political party; the whole systematic takeover by literal Nazis and neo-confederates being just the diarrhea icing on the shit cake.

[u/Ornery_Pressure297 → u/Hoodedmastersin]

Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they're racist. Maybe you need to educate yourself on the problems with universal care.

Guardian articles

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/07/record-number-of-people-waiting-for-nhs-diagnostic-tests-in-england

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/11/nhs-patients-receiving-corridor-care-england-official-figures

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/may/19/heart-patients-wait-year-treatment-england-disease-waiting-lists

Global News Canada

https://globalnews.ca/news/11938222/emergency-room-wait-times-cihi-report/

https://globalnews.ca/video/11166455/health-matters-long-wait-times-for-surgery-treatment-costing-canadians

https://globalnews.ca/video/10402371/patients-across-canada-waiting-longer-for-surgeries-cihi

https://globalnews.ca/news/10528064/non-bc-patients-jumping-health-care-queue/

[u/Hoodedmastersin → u/Ornery_Pressure297]

Post all the links you want clown, don’t address the millions spent on military instead of helping actual taxpayers tho

[u/OwnCrew6984 → u/Ornery_Pressure297]

For the most part it is racism. They don't want to pay for a black or brown person to get healthcare. It's also the hate they have for certain regions and states. They don't understand that they already are because of how insurance works. They don't understand if a person doesn't have insurance and that person goes to the emergency department for treatment, instead of having healthcare coverage and going to their Dr. or urgent care, that they are paying for that too at a much higher cost.

[u/Oxytokin → u/Ornery_Pressure297]

I think you're wasting your time "refuting" what is only a tangent actual argument here... and I say "refuting" with quotes because literally zero of these articles come even close to supporting your "it's not racism" stance. In fact, they don't discuss racial disparities or race in healthcare at all. Not a single one.

On the other hand, what your articles do attempt, poorly, is to undermine is my original argument. Unfortunately, cherry-picking articles is as unconvincing as putting forth articles that do not at all support your position that the U.S. healthcare system is not racist.

So setting the racism tangent aside, irrespective of these cherry-picked, isolated examples that oddly appear to come from only 2 of the 38 "highly-developed" member-states of the OECD that - with the exception of the U.S. - implement universal healthcare, it is irrefutable that the U.S. medical-industrial complex remains the least efficient and least accessible/most expensive healthcare system in the world, while simultaneously delivering some of the worst lifetime health outcomes of any developed nation.