Proponents of UHC: Why is free / cheap healthcare regarded as something that the federal government should provide for everyone, as opposed to free food, free clothing, free water, or free housing?
The perception seems to be that all health care is the same and people don’t shop around. This isn’t totally true, but it’s close enough, and combined with people being unable to afford health care in the event of a serious illness, creates momentum for government to pay for it.
I think where we go badly wrong is in paying for routine expenses, but that’s political. When people get their broken leg fixed for little or no money, they express support for the system. If government health care systems only treated the big stuff, then their failures would be more visible. Instead, you have the healthy people talking about how awesome it is, and the sick people not complaining for long.
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While you can probably find some cites about what various political groups believe or have written into their platform, I think this will do better in IMHO where proponents of UHC can express their opinions.
Moving thread from GQ to IMHO.
You know it isn’t “free” right?
You know it isn’t “free”? You understand the principle behind insurance?
Yes. If it were free, I assume no one would ever be against it. Well, few would be anyway.
So, proponents of UHC: Why is taxpayer provided healthcare regarded as something that the federal government should provide for everyone, as opposed to taxpayer provided food, taxpayer provided clothing, taxpayer provided water, or taxpayer provided housing?
Do you propose that we start paying for police protection and fire services as well? Should all roads across the country be toll roads? Should the military come to your door and demand money before they employ soldiers to protect you?
What about social security? Should you just be left to fend for yourself once you retire?
Taxpayer paid government services aren’t exactly anything new. Comparing it to taxpayer paid food and water makes it seem like this would be the first thing that the government has ever paid for. It would most definitely not be.
Here’s my take on it.
People as a whole are very short sighted when it comes to health care. When you are young and healthy, you don’t want to pay for old people’s health care. When you are old, you need more money than you have, but the people who are now young don’t want to pay for you.
UHC would force everyone to pay, and it would come out of taxes so ideally it would just be just another number taken out of your check and it wouldn’t affect your take-home pay. In the real world, you’d probably have to mandate an increase in the minimum wage to make that happen, and admittedly that would impact the economy in a whole bunch of ways.
But overall, once you get everyone paying into the system, then you’ve got a much larger pool of money and you can pay for everything, instead of the system we have now where only healthy people do ok. If you have chronic health issues, or god forbid, mental health issues, you’ll find out very quickly how little modern insurance companies pay for such things.
You also take all of the money that currently goes into insurance company executive and stockholder pockets and put that money towards actually healing people, instead of using it to make rich people richer.
And…for the hundredth time, we aren’t re-inventing the wheel.
The pre-ACA system cost almost TWICE as much as the next closest country’s system.
For much WORSE healthcare.
The US already spends more than all but two countries per capita, despite not having UHC.
Other countries governments spend less per capita and have UHC.
What do Republicans not understand about that?
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It is a different beast from those things.
The amount of healthcare you need to keep you alive is so variable, so capricious and so impossible to plan for as to be unmanageable by the average citizen.
On the other hand, the costs of food, clothing, water and even housing is known and attainable by the average person. No-one is going to sit you down tomorrow and tell you that unless you eat an ounce of beluga caviar a day, drink perrier and wear mink for the rest of your life you are going to die.
Roads, schools, military, parks, policing, fire services, judiciary and legal services…seems to me like basic universal healthcare fits neatly alongside those.
Why is tax payer provided education regarded as something which the United States provides?
Because we don’t let people die in the streets.
It is an obligation - an absolute moral obligation - in a civilized society to provide a certain level of health care (to other people) such as not to let people die in the streets.
While that doesn’t say federal government should be doing or arranging any of this, that is a logical choice. Federal and, of course, other levels of government.
Also I think the (federal) government does provide some of those other things you mention as well, both directly and indirectly through taxpayer provided money (like Social Security).
Healthcare IS different from the things you’ve mentioned. We all pay taxes for schools and roads, even if we don’t have kids or drive cars. Why? It makes a better society when everyone has access to education and when there are roads to accommodate movement of peoples and goods. The ENTIRE society benefits from these things, it literally makes a better country.
Now imagine that police and fire/ambulance services were also ‘for profit’. What would that look like? 911 is gonna wanna see your receipt before they send out that fire engine, and the police are gonna require a $50 pay in advance fee before sending a car. THAT would be monsterous by any interpretation.
But that IS what’s monsterous about for profit medicine. No one chooses sickness or injury, just as they don’t choose for their house to catch fire.
Going back to the opening question here.
First of all, some people DO want the government to provide all those things. But watch out that you don’t jump to the usual conclusions about that either. Although it’s very popular these days, to pretend that any time the “government” provides something to civilians, that it’s all about stealing from the ones who work for a living in order to give it away to lazy freeloaders, that’s bunk.
Next, especially here in the United States, lots of people like to forget (again, especially nowadays) that our government is designed to be US. It’s not a group of foreigners who subjugated everyone, it’s not a bunch of space aliens, it’s a group of our neighbors who we purposely gave powers to, in order to make our lives a little better (hopefully). So when the “government” starts “giving stuff away” to people, that’s US, doing things FOR US.
Now. As for why one aspect of our lives is considered to be something that we should all pay taxes to have the government handle for us, that’s not as logic based as proponents and especially opponents would have you believe. It’s more of a historical accident, than anything else.
Here in the United States, few people remember or learned it, but at one time, for a LONG time, we didn’t have armies. Our so-called forefathers really wanted at first, to have no standing armies at all, because they thought that was how free societies were turned into dictatorships. After a few painful wars that didn’t go so well because we took too long to get organized after w were attacked, the descendants of those folks arranged for us all to be taxed to pay to have trained and prepared forces available at all times.
Health care didn’t come to be a political hot button for the US, until relatively recently, when the cost of it shot through the roof, during the same period when the chosen solution to economic competition from overseas, was to reduce the wealth of the middle and lower classes.
Essentially, just as we decided to have government handle warfare, and policing and various other things, because most individuals couldn’t afford to handle it themselves, we are now finally starting to consider doing the same thing with health care.
By the way, if you want to get to the most honest and comprehensive understanding of this, you should as the exact same questions of the opponents to UHC as well.
They are COLLECTIVELY not as honest or rational as they pretend to be.
OK, I’ll say it. In a country as rich as the United States, no one should starve, have to go naked (as opposed to voluntarily going naked, if you’re into that sort of thing) or live without a roof over their head. So, yes, I believe the country as a whole should ensure that people are clothed, fed and housed. Now that doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to eat at a four-star restaurant, wear designer clothes or live in a mansion all at the expense of the federal government. But the basics should be ensured to all.
Similarly, healthcare should be provided to all living in this country. Remember that those without health insurance may end up at the emergency room with life-threatening complications of something that could have been treated more cheaply and effectively with regular care. So UHC should end up costing less (in a collective sense). As noted above, the US spends more than other industrialized countries on healthcare while getting worse results, and not even covering everyone.
No, it doesn’t seem like that to me. Food and water are essential for life, and so the comparison is apt. We’re not talking about government provided chocolate bars. I think the default position should be: The government doesn’t provide the service unless there is a good reason for doing so. And it has to go beyond “some people can’t afford that service”. If some people can’t afford it, then the government might need to step in for those people, but not necessarily everyone.
Then you come to the question about whether the federal government should provide that service or should it be up to the states. The OP specifically asked about the federal government. Granted, the OP didn’t flesh his ideas out much, but it seems like you are jumping to unnecessary conclusions.
AFAICT, the only reason for federalizing this is significant savings. That might well be enough of a reason, but personally I would like to see this done at the state level. I don’t see how we get such a program off the ground at the federal level in a country as big and diverse as the US is.
We do provide free healthcare: go to an emergency room with a serious condition and they will treat you regardless of whether you will pay them. If someone can’t pay, all of the rest of us get to foot the bill. That is how it works now.
Our problem is that people know this, and game the system. Rather than paying for health insurance and preventative care, they wait until they’re at a crisis point and go to the emergency room for treatment. And at that point, it is much more expensive to treat the problem than it would have been if they’d had regular doctor visits and caught the issue early. So, all of us get to foot their much more expensive bill.
UHC means that the people who can’t pay for the emergency services that hospitals must provide, will be able to get (cheaper) preventative care to prevent the (expensive) emergency intervention. The federal government should provide UHC because it will reduce the ridiculous expense that the federal government is incurring by having all the uninsured people relying on emergency medicine.
Also, UHC means the taxpayers who have enough income to be ruined by medical expenses that they can’t quite pay, will continue to pay taxes instead of going bankrupt from catastrophic illness.
I think the best argument is about efficiency – looking at various systems around the world, some version of UHC delivers better care to more people for less cost than the American system, in general.