Lately, I can’t help but ponder America’s health care policies, and how brazenly, utterly, and completely insane it is. Today I needed some medicine and a brace for one of my limbs. I made an appointment, and the doctor saw me the same day. They gave me my medicine and my brace, and the whole process took a little over an hour. Nobody asked about health insurance, I didn’t have to ask permission from my house insurance company, and I paid not even a dime out of my pocket. And it doesn’t matter if I stub my toe or get leukemia. The answer is the same: I get whatever I need and only rarely am I asked to pay even a small amount.
So after living most of my life getting free healthcare while witnessing other people’s bad experiences with America’s profit-oriented system, I have come to a conclusion:
If you vote against universal health care, you are fucking stupid.
I mean, seriously. People offer you medicine to keep you and your family alive, and you say, “No! That’s Communism / Slavery / Whatever…” (Yes, I have heard this from actual humans) Because apparently you prefer the current ineffective and corrupt health care system over the one in which your family gets whatever they need to keep them healthy.
I’m not even sorry. I cannot fathom a worldview in which that makes even the slightest bit of sense. That’s just the dumbest, most self-destructive thing I’ve ever heard.
And here’s the thing…
I don’t care whether you get health care or not. I don’t need you to vote for anything or any one. I’ve already got the best health care on Earth, and I get everything I need. So it makes no difference to me whether you fix it or not.
You are only hurting yourselves and your families.
Stupid we have in great abundance. I learned in late 2016 that it was in even greater abundance than I previously thought (and I had thought it pretty high before). Abundant stupidity not unique to the US, but our stupid seem to be very, very proud of their overwhelming stupidity.
There’s absolutely no reason imaginable that we don’t have universal healthcare for all in this country, the supposedly wealthiest on Earth, other than political malfeasance, insurance industry money/lobbyists and stupid, reactionary right wing voters.
It’s socialism! It’s Obama!
These same idiots that cry over this issue gladly pay into social security and would go on a rampage if it ever went broke before they could collect it.
Why does nobody cause a big to-do over social security? It too, is a form of socialism. It’s right in the name! SOCIAL security!
We, the thing about Americans, you see, is that they’re trained from youth to live in terror that another American might be getting a benefit he or she didn’t entirely deserve. Sure, they occasionally respond with a violent primitive patriotism in defense of symbols like anthems and flags, but a sense of obligation to fellow Americans in the form of some kind of social contract? It is alien to them, even when it is in their own best interests.
It’s not necessarily “concern”. Speaking for myself, I have three reasons for interest in the US health care system:
academic interest that such appalling sheer stupidity could allow a major first-world country to put up with a system like that; if the US didn’t exist, and you wrote a sci-fi story about such a system, it would be considered dystopian and lacking believability
the fact that I have family there that has to put up with that shit
actual concern, in the same sense that civilized countries have concern and empathy for the suffering of third-world countries
I presume you need to know what country the other poster lives in so you can search Breitbart, Fox News, and Newsmax and see if Betsy McCaughey or Ann Coulter has put together a pack of lies on why that country’s health system totally sucks. I believe you’ll find “people are literally dying waiting for treatment” near the top of the list.
Well, that presupposes the “concern” part, which strikes me as begging the question. Besides, doesn’t concern trolling usually have an element along the lines of “Oh, how I wish you would only realize how much you are hurting yourselves” or some such faux-lamentation, i.e. “Oh, I feel sad when I wish Democrats could bring themselves to just love America a little more because then they’d be better off.”
Personally, I think asking why Americans are stupidly intransigent on this issue is a perfectly fair thing to do.
ETA: the OP has since responded, and it’s looks like his concerns are genuine, unlike the faux-concerns of the concern troll.
I daresay most of us are not, but for some of us, it’s a mildly interesting case study in social propaganda.
Well, plus the horror stories offer a certain visceral thrill. I almost never go camping, for example, but watching fictional characters get machete’d to death in the woods by a hockey-mask-wearing psychopath has certain entertainment value. In this case, the fictional characters just happen to be real Americans, some of whom have determinedly voted for the system that is letting them die, because they’ve been trained to since childhood.
