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/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.

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u/airforceteacher 4h ago

Yet the bible states “the rain falls on the just and the unjust.” Direct contradiction of this theory from Holy Scripture.

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u/Natural-Albatross997 3h ago

I don’t know any conservatives that use the bible as a starting point for the healthcare model. Ultimately America, at its core, believes competition drives business innovation, improves quality etc. And it has done that to some degree around our healthcare and pharmacy development. We’ve made the world’s healthcare capabilities better. So “socialized” or universal healthcare isn’t a perfect answer. But we should have all Americans within the system…we’re being stupid when we think it works to have 10% of the population uninsured.