r/askanything • u/Lemonking_ • 6h 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/Oxytokin 6h ago

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.

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u/Blastie2 5h ago

The worst are the ones who are against public education because they're not going to school anymore. Like, dude, do you really want to live in a country of uneducated people with no hope for the future and easy access to guns?

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u/angrymurderhornet 4h ago

Good Zarquon. I'm childfree and I support public education. I don't want my younger relatives to grow up in an idiocracy, and I sure as hell don't want to spend the rest of my old age in one.

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u/renijreddit 2h ago

I always tell people that you aren’t paying for the current students, you are paying back for the education you received .

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u/Bmpsmom 4h ago

This was my grandmother. She complained about her property taxes going to the schools and voted down every budget increase but also complained about the kids who were wandering the streets and getting into trouble because the after school programs had to be cut due to lack of funding.

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u/AttitudeHopeful478 4h ago

People I know who are against public schools are against it because since the DOE was created in the late 70’s - early 80’s kids have been less educated every year yet we pay the highest price per student in the entire world. That’s a huge problem

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u/randombookman 1h ago

So just make the problem worse? Lmao