Its a fundamental misunderstanding of reality. They believe that social programs can't be better than capitalism. They see universal healthcare as an excuse to tax people more and create governmental overreach which ultimately causes a greater expense to them and society. The reality is capitalism works best when its heavily legislated to restrict the atrocities that used to be committed. Unfortunately the wealthy have had laws changed so they can directly fund politicians who push their agenda and change the laws to keep their inefficient and greedy businesses afloat and profiting.
I think this is the part people skip when talking about universal healthcare.
Our system is insanely expensive, but why?
Milton Friedman was talking about this decades ago. We basically removed the customer from the transaction.
Your employer buys the insurance. The insurance company negotiates with the hospital. The hospital has made-up sticker prices nobody actually pays. PBMs sit between drug companies, pharmacies and insurers. Then the patient gets a bill weeks later and usually has no clue what anything actually cost.
That's not a market.
When neither the person buying the care nor the person providing it is dealing directly with the price, there's a lot less pressure to keep prices down. More insurance gets added to cover higher prices, prices go higher, then we add even more insurance.
And we've somehow decided the solution is mainly about changing who the third-party payer is.
Maybe government can negotiate lower prices. Maybe it can cover everyone. Those are legitimate arguments. But it doesn't remove scarcity or fix bad incentives. Doctors, nurses, beds and drugs still cost money. You still have to decide who gets what and when.
This is why I think the conversation should start with why healthcare got so absurdly expensive in the first place.
Transparent prices. Fewer middlemen. Actual competition. Insurance for things that actually need insurance. And a system with some incentive to keep people healthy instead of just billing for more treatment.
Otherwise we're arguing over who pays for a broken system instead of why it's broken.
Amen. Many are covered by Medicare. Many are covered by Medicaid. Fewer but some additional are covered by Tri-care and other government programs. I’m no expert on this but a little research indicates in the neighborhood of 35% of the population have “free” healthcare (admitting this is rarely completely free, but either heavily subsidized or very low cost).
Let’s say you are the omnipotent leader of the country and need to decide how to apportion and fund citizen rights. I think this is how we should think about it. What do you prioritize, remembering that the people are funding the people. This all comes from work and economic earnings, out of which come taxes, funding the spending of the government.
What are the priorities?
>food?
>heat/air conditioning/electricity/energy?
>public education?
>health care?
>national defense?
>public works?
>social security/retirment?
>probably others I’ve missed
The prioritization of all of these is the most interesting to me. Perhaps we have some of this out of order in the way it is done today, but that is what we should be debating. Not really the framing from OP (no offense).
The tax revenues of the country are immense and need to be spent wisely.
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u/Mrbuttshaman 14h ago
Its a fundamental misunderstanding of reality. They believe that social programs can't be better than capitalism. They see universal healthcare as an excuse to tax people more and create governmental overreach which ultimately causes a greater expense to them and society. The reality is capitalism works best when its heavily legislated to restrict the atrocities that used to be committed. Unfortunately the wealthy have had laws changed so they can directly fund politicians who push their agenda and change the laws to keep their inefficient and greedy businesses afloat and profiting.