Tweet is from around February 2022; I’m not visiting that cesspool to find the exact date.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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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.
Logical argument: profit
Edit for clarity: /s
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.
THERE! So the billionaire pays more to get higher quality insurance. In a single payer universal healthcare system, the billionaire and the minimum wage worker both get the same quality of healthcare despite paying different amounts. This is what I mean.
I have experience with the Indian multi payer, non universal healthcare system. It sucks a lot more than the US. U guys at least have the affordable healthcare act, which prohibits discrimination against ppl with pre-existing conditions by insurance companies. Indians don't even have that. The universal single payer healthcare system that I have experience with is the Canadian one.
Now, of course the arguments against universal healthcare fall flat on ethical grounds, as you explained above. I am not saying that universal healthcare is bad or whatever. However, that does not change the fact that universal healthcare follows the "from each according to their ability to each according to their need" thing. Rich or poor, everyone gets the same quality of healthcare despite paying different prices. The rich here are subsidizing the poor.
Now, there's nothing wrong with that. The concepts of private property themselves cause trouble, where we lose all sight of humanity, blah blah blah. That's a discussion for another day.
The point is, if you are rich and want a better life for yourself, you probably should be against universal healthcare. If u r anything but that, and want a better life for everyone- u, ur family, ur friends, or just society in general, universal healthcare is a common sense choice.
That doesn't change the fact that selfishness in this case is measurably less prudent in the long run. This is often the case for capitalist ills, but being selfish is only in one's self interest if they ignore the bigger picture. The effects of our broken healthcare system are more well documented and understood, but it's also the case with poverty and climate change. They make things worse for even the wealthiest people.
Even though the collective class of wealthy people is smaller and more capable of working together, they often got there by refusing to think about the collective, while those who were less selfish tended to get filtered out. It's all too easy to undercut others who try to work together, so they choose the worse option consistently and fuck over everyone in the process. It's the prisoner's dilemma, with no one having the guts to risk the others getting ahead.
That is the fundamental reason why no major country will abandon fossil fuels. All our kids would be better off, but there's too much risk of losing out to someone who didn't do their part.
However, part of the problem is that the capitalists in charge refuse to acknowledge the benefits of not being selfish. To avoid the internal conflict of questioning their choices, we easily ignore unfortunate truths. It happens everywhere, from comedy entertainment to the highest levels of science. Repeated game theory does not favor the most selfish strategies, but people think that selfishness pays off in the long run, so they refuse to consider the most prudent options.
So no, you are actually wrong about what's in rich people's self interest, but you're wrong in the same way they are. Capitalists are not more logical than average people; they're actually quite stubborn and stupid. They'll drink lead and die from it before they'll accept that they're wrong about it being safe.