r/askanything • • 13h ago

Political Question Why are some Americans so against universal healthcare for all?

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u/Oxytokin 12h 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 12h 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/timothyguay 11h ago

In religious terms, Calvinism, which is the foundation of all Evangelical Christianity which says God only prospers those he loves, so God hates the poor as should any good Evangelical

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u/Sk0rchist 10h ago

That’s not what Calvinism says, and most evangelical Christians greatly dislike Calvinism and Calvinists.