The actual answer to the OPs question has less to do with why we don’t have universal healthcare than why we do have public education. The latter goes way back to colonial times when the goal was to make sure that all puritan children could read the bible. From there it was just a matter of morphing and expanding it to the state it is today.
At the start of healthcare in the US, your survival from disease wasn’t that much better with or without a doctor, so a doctors visit was nice to have but not something that everyone needed. Now healthcare has improved to the point that it is unethical to leave people with serious medial conditions untreated. Universal health care is the answer but its hard to make the jump away from the way things have always been done.
That’s why there were public schools in Massachusetts in the 17th century. It has nothing to do with why there are public schools in every state today. Universal public education wasn’t even discussed in the US until about 1800.
This is also how healthcare developed in Europe and the rest of the world too, until it became apparent that it could fairly readily be reorganized to provide something much better and much more efficient. There were nasty political battles about it too (certainly in the UK, which was the pioneer) as entrenched economic interests who were making money off the inefficiencies of the old, privatized system, fought against reform, just as they do now (notably by putting out the sort of obfuscatory disinformation that you are repeating).
The difference is not in the pre-existing health care system (although, by now, the US system has been allowed to get far worse, far more inefficient and corrupt, than European systems were at the time of reform), the difference is in the extreme spinelessness and corruption of government in the USA in the face of wealthy and entrenched corporate power.
After the American Civil War, the State governments in the South were controlled by progressives, and many of their constituents were former slaves. So, free education was a very big deal. The ability to read and write was well understood as an important thing by folks who had recently been slaves. So, they put free public education in their state constitutions. I think all of the Southern states did it at the time. Thus, a free, state-funded, public education became a thing.
By now, costs of employer-provided health insurance are often $10,000 per employee-year, or even $15,000 or more. Most of this cost is usually “invisible” to the employee. Can you imagine the shrieks and consternation in America if these costs were broken out in the paycheck-stub and called a “tax”?
In another thread, self-identified right-wingers identified the problem with UHC as “free-loaders”:
That private-insured people have exactly the same propensity (or lack of propensity) to “freeload” as public-insured people do, seems to be beyond the grasp of right-wingers. Or, more likely, it really is a matter of morality: People without money don’t deserve the things money can buy.
Education is one of those things that the benefits are obvious for- people make more money, they can vote more effectively, public information can be distributed more effectively, etc… No picture-ballots in our elections, thank you.
Universal health care isn’t so easy to see. The class divides in the country mean that something that affects the poor doesn’t necessarily affect other classes very much. I mean, I’ve ALWAYS had employer-subsidized health insurance. The idea of not being able to afford a doctor visit is utterly foreign to me, as I suspect it is to the vast majority of middle class people. I may pay somewhat more or less in co-pays, premiums and deductibles depending on where I work, and what the current plan is, but ultimately, it’s not a crushing cost.
When a lot of middle-class people think universal health care, they basically see ANOTHER tax being added to their current tax burden to (essentially) pay for all the people in the ghetto, illegal aliens and vagrants. When it’s thought of that way, it’s hard to see what the necessity of it is, especially since they and theirs are covered, and it’s going to cost them more.
If a political party is serious about universal health care, they need to prove that the abolition of employer-subsidized health care premiums and the imposition of whatever tax is necessary to pay for it doesn’t increase the middle and upper classes’ tax burdens.
To be fair, the issue with “freeloaders” was for the most part discussing those that did not want to pay for insurance until they got sick under the zero-reject of Obamacare.
The quote I excerpted was from a thread about “Universal Health Care, pros and cons”, not about Obamacare.
It is very clear that some (perhaps not most) right-wingers have a sense of morality that implies people should not get care they don’t pay for. In fact, credible economists have calculated that the U.S. spends as much money for a bureaucracy to deny care, as would be needed to provide a good level of care for the uninsured.
The United States has an entrenched system that makes a lot of money off of healthcare. It’s a well-funded special interest that wants to maintain the status quo that favors it.
The majority of people would benefit from changes in the health care system but that majority is diffuse and unfocused.
Huh? Medicaid is government provided health insurance for the poor, it is not healthcare. Medicaid doesn’t even cover all the poor, basically just pregnant women and dependent children. This might change in 2014 if states opt in for the Medicaid expansion, which would cover any US citizen (not just women and children) who earn below ~133% of FPL.
Have you ever compared US quality of care to other nations with UHC?
What a horribly inaccurate answer. The American healthcare system worked quite well until LBJ turned it into a vote-buying scheme and inflicted Medicare on us. It’s been in the toilet ever since.
It’s not really the healthcare business, it’s the health insurance business. Through lack of regulation and competition they impose a de facto tax on those who don’t want to be left to an underfunded public healthcare system, which is then funded with an actual tax through the government.
Because overtons window has moved universal education into the ranks of policy, while UHC is still considered a mix of acceptable and radical.
Also, just to add to the strangeness of how the overton window affects debate, a lot of those who are most anti-UHC are either one or will soon be on medicare which is a single payer government program funded by taxes. The majority of them will not give up their UHC.
Our system has started breaking down because as of the 21st century, even if you do everything ‘right’ health care is still probably a luxury. If you go to school, get a good job, pay your bills on time, take care of yourself, etc. you can still lose everything if you get sick or you may have junk insurance that only covers catastrophic care. I don’t think our system really worked in any great way for huge swaths of people. Medicaid has a provider shortage, medicare may have one too if cuts are made, 1/6 of people are uninsured, another 1/6 or more are underinsured. Before medicare and medicaid, the poor and elderly were screwed. Maybe for a period in the 80s our system was ok, but that is about it and before the prices exploded.
When it was just the poor people really didn’t give a shit but now that our health care system is leaving the middle class behind, it is starting to become a serious issue. It is like school violence and youth violence, as long as it was on the fringes of society nobody really cared much (they wanted more law enforcement, but that was to keep the violence out of the better neighborhoods). Once the good neighborhoods had violence (columbine, etc) then it became a nationwide crisis.
Realpolitik at its best. My question is what happens in the US when health care becomes even more unobtainable for the middle class? Obamacare is just a bandaid, it mandates people buy into an overpriced, poorly run system rather than reforming the system. The true reforms this country needs to get health care costs under control would go against the financial interests of several businesses worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Eventually there will have to be an actual battle between the bottom 85% of the country and the business interests on the subject of health care.
I predict major reforms will happen on the state level, and we may get nationwide major reforms in the late 2020s.