20 years from now, will it still be mainstream Republican thought that the government shouldn’t guarantee healthcare to all Americans? Or will they eventually accept the principle of universal coverage like conservatives do in the rest of the developed world?
I don’t know about 20 years from now, but as society gets wealthier (as it has, in general, for the last century and more), services like health care (basic health care, anyway – as opposed to fancy health care that might develop to do things like provide enhancements rather than cures/healing/treatment) will become relatively cheaper, and it seems inevitable to me that society (American and elsewhere) will eventually make the decision that everyone should have health care regardless of ability to pay.
We’re already up to something like 60% thinking that yes, it needs to be a basic service provided or guaranteed by the government. The GOP base is already telling them to cut the shit.
American conservatism does not track with European conservatism. Euro conservatism was born out of deference to government and it’s ability to maintain a status quo of sorts. American conservatism, in its modern form, was born out of a rejection of the New Deal, a schedule of programs that made sense from a Euro conservative perspective. That being said, if a skewed understanding of economics continues to prevail electorally, of course the Republican Party will back nationwide health insurance coverage.
Setting ideological posturing (like the above, somehow claiming the mainstream is “skewed”) aside, as long as the GOP base demands Replace along with Repeal (which they do), and the party has no Replace option that doesn’t hurt millions of people, then yes, they’ll accept (if not embrace) it out of political reality, just like they acquiesced to Social Security and Medicare. The last few weeks have laid it bare.
I don’t follow that at all. If it wasn’t sarcasm, please elaborate.
He said “yes, but only because voters are dumb.”
Or maybe that it’s the *polls *that are skewed, or that the public will eventually oppose it once they finally come to their senses. Or something about Austrian economics, whateverthehell that is, being the Way of Truth and Light.
It’s just another battle the ongoing war between reality and his beliefs.
Pretty simple actually. The public believes that if government spends more on healthcare (or mandates that the public spends more), the cost will go down, and health outcomes will improve. That analysis would not make sense in theory, and many decades of government intervention into the healthcare economy shows that the opposite is true.
Except for every time it’s actually been done.
OK. So you assume that the best UHC model is capitalistic. Thank you.
I’m inclined to go with Little Nemo’s assessment.
Universal health care would involve less spending for better outcomes. My cite? The entire world, minus one country.
“But the US is different. We’re not like the rest of the world. We have too many people, or something.”
At least that’s the narrative I keep hearing from the right. They seem to have no faith in our country being able to do something everyone else is able to do. Whatever happened to American exceptionalism?
I think the opposite will happen. As society gets richer, the % of GDP devoted to health care will continue to increase. The US created medicare and medicaid when we were only spending 6% of GDP on health care. We now spend 18% of GDP on health care.
Most western nations that have UHC created their programs when they were only spending 6-9% of GDP on health care.
My impression is health care spending will eventually follow a bell shaped curve. It’ll get higher and higher, then start declining when we start to actually combat diseases more cheaply, effectively and permanently (especially diseases of aging). But who knows when that will occur, we could be looking at rising medical costs for another 100+ years.
We are right on the cusp of direct manipulation of genes. That could be a total game changer for healthcare.
“Will Republicans eventually accept universal healthcare?”
Only if Democrats turn against it.
Hmm… a plan…
Some cites would be helpful here.
I think republicans absolutely could accept universal healthcare, but to do that, the liberal democrats are going to have to stop this bullshit holy war against all American businesses and all individuals who earn over $100,000. That is the only way it will happen.
The Democrats have talked incessantly about raising taxes on people earning $200,000 or more without considering the fact that they might be business owners with lots of overhead costs, or that they might be small businesses in need of hiring an employee or two.
Universal healthcare would actually go a long way toward building bridges with people like independent contractors, sole proprietors, and small businesses, who are part and parcel of the so-called “white working class” that seems so mysterious to coastal academics and elitists on the left. Maybe it’s time to start talking these people instead of analyzing them and trying to always figure out “What went wrong” in election post-mortems.