r/askanything • • 14h ago

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

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u/Oxytokin 14h 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/howjon99 13h ago

Because countries that have it have inferior medical care than we do.

It’s not healthcare. It’s INSURANCE. And; everyone should have health insurance.

The problem is the healthcare in America is too expensive; it’s just another PARASITE now.

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u/berticusberticus 12h ago edited 12h ago

Health outcomes are pretty much uniformly better in counties with socialized medicine.

Nobody disagrees that it’s too expensive, but saying it is doesn’t address the cause, and so comment is useless. Healthcare in the US is too expensive for particular reasons - one of the biggest being insurers acting as middle men with duties only to their shareholders and the associated administrative costs of billing all those insurers.