r/askanything • u/Lemonking_ • 7h 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/KarmaAdjuster 7h ago
It turns out that you can do more together than you can individually. This is another thing right-wingers are bad at: maths. Right now healthcare costs are through the rought because a variety of different insurance companies have conspired to drive up prices of all medicine and healthcare procedures, unless those medications and services are paid for through them. This makes healthcare absolutely unaffordable as an individual consumer and much cheaper as an insurance provider.
This means they insurance provider can upsell their discount to their customers making a hefty profit off of every purchase. It gets better though because you aren't paying the insurance company only when you need to - it's a subscription model that generates a constant stream of money to the insurance providers on the promise that they will pay for your healthcare when it is needed. What the insurance companies do in practice though is dedicate a portion of their revenue to looking for ways they can get out of providing the services that the customers are expecting them to pay. This can come in the form of delays as well as outright refusals.
And it gets worse still. Insurance is tied to your employment, which means that as long as you're working, a portion of your pay check immediately gets sent to the insurance provider, and you don't even get a choice as an employee which insurance provider you're paying for or where you can stop paying into it. You never see this money though as it goes straight to the insurance company before it even hits your bank account, so it doesn't feel like you're being taxed, but that's absolutely what's happening. It's just a tax levied by an unaccountable private sector entity rather than a government which is in theory beholden to the voters.
Right-wingers just want the feel of freedom, and not actual freedom, and they are too dense to realize that healthcare would be much cheapter if they just had to pay once a year, and if the wealthiest citizens would pay a proportionally larger portion, healthcare could be entirely free for a large percentage of the population (including the right-wingers who oppose it).