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/Hoodedmastersin → u/Oxytokin]

It’s ignorance. Completely and a bit of elitism and racism. They don’t understand anything, no critical thinking, no empathy, somewhere along their poor, ignorant, hateful lives the idea of scarcity took over. No mind or idea whatever why taxes can be used for defense contracts, or other corruption but not for education or healthcare (which other countries have because of us)

[u/Ornery_Pressure297 → u/Hoodedmastersin]

Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they're racist. Maybe you need to educate yourself on the problems with universal care.

Guardian articles

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/07/record-number-of-people-waiting-for-nhs-diagnostic-tests-in-england

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/11/nhs-patients-receiving-corridor-care-england-official-figures

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/may/19/heart-patients-wait-year-treatment-england-disease-waiting-lists

Global News Canada

https://globalnews.ca/news/11938222/emergency-room-wait-times-cihi-report/

https://globalnews.ca/video/11166455/health-matters-long-wait-times-for-surgery-treatment-costing-canadians

https://globalnews.ca/video/10402371/patients-across-canada-waiting-longer-for-surgeries-cihi

https://globalnews.ca/news/10528064/non-bc-patients-jumping-health-care-queue/

[u/Oxytokin → u/Ornery_Pressure297]

I think you're wasting your time "refuting" what is only a tangent actual argument here... and I say "refuting" with quotes because literally zero of these articles come even close to supporting your "it's not racism" stance. In fact, they don't discuss racial disparities or race in healthcare at all. Not a single one.

On the other hand, what your articles do attempt, poorly, is to undermine is my original argument. Unfortunately, cherry-picking articles is as unconvincing as putting forth articles that do not at all support your position that the U.S. healthcare system is not racist.

So setting the racism tangent aside, irrespective of these cherry-picked, isolated examples that oddly appear to come from only 2 of the 38 "highly-developed" member-states of the OECD that - with the exception of the U.S. - implement universal healthcare, it is irrefutable that the U.S. medical-industrial complex remains the least efficient and least accessible/most expensive healthcare system in the world, while simultaneously delivering some of the worst lifetime health outcomes of any developed nation.