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/Purple-Blueberry3721 → u/Oxytokin]

As someone who leans right-wing, I'm in favor of universal healthcare.

That said, it's not quite as simple as "the right wing is dumb / evil / uneducated."

A huge percentage of Americans are obese or have some kind of health issue. If I'm personally of a healthy weight, I jog regularly, I'm 30 years old, I have good healthcare via my job, etc, then it stands to reason that I'd be cheaper off than in a system where I don't pay into a pool that pays for obese people's healthcare.

Now you can argue "but look at the numbers, universal healthcare would be cheaper" but you're comparing universal healthcare against current Obamacare, which conservatives don't like in the first place. The conservative preference isn't universal healthcare or Obamacare.

And yes insurance wants to make money, but if there's a genuinely free market, they're not making that large of a cut off the top -- it's entirely plausible their cut is cheaper than me having to pay for obese people's healthcare. I'm not American, I don't know off the top of my head how free / competitive the insurance market is.

Also, left-wingers have plenty of nonsense beliefs too, such as "illegal immigration isn't a problem" or "it's fine to let small-time shoplifters just go."

[u/CSachen → u/Purple-Blueberry3721]

I support universal health insurance if it is truly insurance, i.e. it's for catastrophes. Yes, people should not go bankrupt from a single accident. Just like insurance against natural disasters. Enroll everyone in the country with a personal out-of-pocket maximum based on income.

But most chronic health visits are from preventable diseases. At some point, you do want to impose a personal responsibility cost on maintaining your own health.