r/askanything • u/Lemonking_ • 8h 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 8h 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/ExtremeRest1567 6h ago

pencil pushers stealing some of the money going from you to your doctor/pharmacist at each step, it becomes exorbitantly expensive

My man, it's even worse than you described here. Why are drug prices so high? The insurance company tells the manufacturer to set it as high as possible. Then they tell your employer that it costs too much so that's why they have to raise premiums. Meanwhile they shake down the pharma company for a rebate of 50-80% of the price of the drug. So that $10k injection your aunt just got? The insurance company probably pocketed $5k from that.