Poll of the Day > You know what? I change my position on universal healthcare for the USA.

(+) Yeah! (+)

TheNoticingMan posted...

Main issue I see is that there is no tax base for it. Our country is already in debt. I simply don't see how we would afford it. Already something like 40% of Americans don't pay income taxes because they are so poor they don't qualify. I don't see how the middle class would be able to support the extreme costs of universal healthcare. I know there are a bunch of people on the far left who will just say "it's not about fucking over the middle class, we'll just tax the rich at more than 50% of their earnings". And I don't think that will work either. One, there simply aren't enough rich people who make enough money that would pay for all of this. Two, rich people are really fucking good at hiding their money, I'm sure they would easily be able to offshore it or get around paying those taxes. So again the burden falls on your average family.

In addition, it is those who are too poor to pay taxes anyway that will be the ones who cost this system the most. They are the ones who will lead unhealthy or dangerous lifestyles which will result in expensive medical care.

If the US was as small as Norway and most people had great jobs and paid their taxes and there wasn't a massive underclass of impoverished people I would be all for it. But that's not the world we live in. Europeans honestly asking this question should ask themselves if thy would support an EU-wide universal healthcare, because that's more like what we'd have here. Would you want to have Brussels tax you and then use those funds to take care of people in Greece and Turkey and poor nations of eastern Europe?

Also, aside from everything I just said, I also do not trust the US gov't to run such a program properly. A large reason of why medical costs in the US are so expensive is because of insurance and the fact that insurance pays most of the costs of medicine, which provides an incentive for hospitals and pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers to charge very high costs, because they will get paid no matter what even if the patient cannot pay.

I see the same thing happening with universal healthcare except replace "insurance companies" with "government". Why do I think this? Because this is what has happened with University costs. In the late 80s and early 90s the federal government said that they would insure student loans which means they back students, allow them to take out a loan, and then if a student drops or fails out of college, the college still gets their tuition money. The student then has to pay back the loan to the financial institution. The college doesn't suffer because the bank pays them the money. The bank doesn't suffer because they are re-imbursed by the government if the student fails to pay.

On a completely different level than the above two points, our medical system actually isn't that great. There's this belief on reddit and other places that the US actually has really good healthcare, "but only if you can afford it". This isn't entirely true. A lot of hospitals are overworked and overstaffed, and even IF you have good insurance or you have millions of dollars, you STILL can't get the type of care that you deserve.

I just don't see how our federal government, which still runs on computers from the 1990s, which has corruption scandals on a regular basis, which has criminals escape prosecution, will all of a sudden work well enough to provide universal healthcare to 350 million people.

In addition, our federal government has certain hiring guidelines mandating that they hire certain people for reasons other than "this person is most qualified to do the job". That alone is enough reason for me not to trust their ability here.

Fuck man. I didn't even think of all this. The U.S. government is so poorly-managed and can't even fix it's own problems without shutting itself down and I want it to take care of me?

Welcome to the libertarian party
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The hospitals are the real culprits here. How much do you think you'd be paying for insurance if an ace bandage costed $5 at the ER like it does at Walmart? Instead, it's almost a grand. THAT is what really needs to get fixed. As a result, the government would be phased out almost immediately.
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So you don't trust gov't, but you trust private companies? Sure there's bad wait times in countries like Canada, but at least the lower class and their children don't have to choose to perform dangerous self-serguries.

i have never been one to say that the US healthcare system isn't broken

i just take issue with the idea that socializing is the ONLY fucking solution.
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WastelandCowboy posted...

I simply don't see how we would afford it

Well for starters, it would save us money by cutting out the leeching middle-man.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/upshot/why-single-payer-health-care-saves-money.html

A Republican funded think tank actually came out and admitted it with a Republican funded study
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/07/medicare-for-all-mercatus-center-report

Secondly;
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-finds-45000-deaths-annually-linked-to-lack-of-health-coverage/

The result of insurance that fundamentally exists to make money, they won't want to pay people out, they'll want to make it as hard as possible because they won't make money. They'll ramp up prices because they know people have to pay. That's 100% legal.

Troll_Police_ posted...

i just take issue with the idea that socializing is the ONLY fucking solution.

Don't stop there, publically fund prisons too.

Most "social" policies can come from making the top 1% pay their taxes, or badgering the government to stop wasting $700 billion on military nonsense and space forces. The wars are "socialist" too, but for some reason people give them a pass because we don't see a benefit from them, which for some backwards reason makes sense to people.

But at the end of the day, you won't see any of these things done or done right unless we criminalize corruption again.
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waaaaah socialism *spends money on bombs* so heroic!
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We would still spend less on healthcare compared to what we spend on the massively overbloated military industrial complex
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WastelandCowboy posted...

The U.S. government is so poorly-managed and can't even fix it's own problems without shutting itself down

Why are you guys not fixing this shit?
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