Tweet is from around February 2022; I’m not visiting that cesspool to find the exact date.
True. I’m playing Devil’s advocate here. These r arguments that I’ve heard that make sense technically, but not ethically. I’m not saying that real life me would want to give up my universal healthcare lol. It’s a safety net that I absolutely want in my life (for selfish reasons as well)
No. These arguments don’t even make sense technically. Hospitals generally don’t deny emergency care, often leaving people with huge bills after their stay. If someone doesn’t pay, insurance needs to recoup the cost by charging higher rates for everyone. On top of that, preventative care is often cheaper than emergency care, with poorly insured people usually receiving less of it.
Without socialized healthcare, you pay for the care of everyone that can’t pay through your insurance AND people receive worse care overall. The healthcare system functions worse, even when money isn’t as much of a concern. Unless you’re a billionaire with private doctors on payroll 24/7, anyone can get fucked over when emergency care is shit.
There is no logical argument for our system unless you believe wealth can always protect you. They think the foundation can rot away without ever hurting them, but that’s the fantasy of people who believe in perpetual free lunches.
Insurance premiums are flat. They don’t give a shit about your income. The insurance premium for a minimum wage worker and a billionaire would be the same for a given coverage.
When you make it universal and single payer, the billionaire has to pay more money for the same quality of healthcare compared to the minimum wage worker. Therefore, the billionaire is essentially subsidizing the minimum wage worker’s healthcare.
Now of course, you can argue about the ethics of private property, how the billionaire became a billionaire by wage theft and so on. The point is, within the capitalist system that we have, universal healthcare is still the rich person paying for the poor person’s healthcare. This is the technicality that I’m talking about.
Remember, I support universal single payer healthcare. I am merely talking about technicality here.
To address the emergency room situation, what happens when the person being admitted lacks any sort of insurance? If they can’t cough up money, then they go into debt. Their credit scores get screwed. Life becomes hell.
The minimum wage worker simply doesn’t have the same quality insurance. They could never afford the best plans, as those are more than they can pay, so they get more limited plans with less coverage, fewer options, and longer wait times. You often need to pay out of pocket to get acceptable care for certain issues, even if you have decent insurance.
With the emergency room issue, most of that debt the uninsured people take on never gets paid by them. This isn’t just their problem, but a problem for hospitals and doctors and banks who don’t get paid for their work. The banks don’t just shrug their shoulders and accept the systemic loss, but recoup the costs from the entire medical industry. It costs more than 2x for a bandage here because those banks make the cost of providing care higher at every possible step.
As more become uninsured or unable to pay, even the hospitals can’t stay out of the red, shuttering care for millions. Many areas have zero options for hundreds of miles as a result, meaning many people die preventable deaths because it takes hours to get it. The US has a geographic scale you cannot comprehend as someone elsewhere. It’s on the scale of the EU. State politics serve country size populations, but the relative homogeneity of culture betrays this fact.
You have absolutely no idea how a world without single payer works because you assume we have basic shit you take for granted. You once again demonstrate that arguments against single payer MUST IGNORE facts to work, cutting out the bigger picture to keep you from recognizing the scale of the problem. It’s why capitalism is so impossible to tackle in general.
