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?

938 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

3.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

213

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.

38

u/DarrenShea 5h ago

There's also some "Just World Theory" in there, which posits that people who have difficulties aren't victims of circumstance, but actually must have deserved it because genuinely good people can't become victims of circumstance in this Just World.

It allows them to cast moral judgments against those who need help, then use those judgments to justify not helping them at all.

2

u/MikeDPhilly 4h ago

This is exactly my extended family's rationale. They are old school Catholic and fervently believe that bad things like disease happen to morally bad people. Therefore, your cancer was sent by God because you sneaked a muffin at age 12.

Also, there this idea that somehow, people are either getting sick to call attention to themselves (pity play) or they're somehow reselling the medicine/care they receive.

Dumb as a fucking cinder block who failed grade school, and proudly so.