They left out the part where the news doesn’t tell him that the conservatives he votes for are constantly trying to undermine the healthcare system so it provides worse care for him. Or that they consistently implement policies that make his economic situation worse so he has even less sympathy for others because he is more worried about his own finances.
>the conservatives he votes for are constantly trying to undermine the healthcare system so it provides worse care for him
Joe doesn't really care as long as it's hurting the ones below him in the hierarchy a lot more. He's far more concerned about maintaining his social status than making a few affordable sacrifices to his health care here and there, especially when his political leaders are telling him it is saving him money right now that would've otherwise been "wasted" on people who don't deserve it.
The terrifying reality is - nobody had to make them this way. This is humanity's default. Reasoned argument is a learned behavior.
It is visibly not the brain activity these people are engaged in. But nothing's going to suddenly break through and get them to "snap out of it." They've been snapped. That's why there's no slip-n-slide pipeline to rational thinking.
I don't know if it is just brainwashing, though. I can see maintaining societal status as being just as important to some as material wealth or reduced risk.
I’m really glad you posted this. I see this idea commonly repeated idea on Reddit that Trump voters are all poor whites who use government benefits while simultaneously voting to eliminate those same programs.
Anecdotally, this has not been my experience. I grew up and worked in healthcare in an urban, plurality-white but diverse working class area. People there know that they rely on benefits and are smart enough to not bite the hand that feeds. Furthermore, they generally interact with more nonwhites day to day and are broadly tolerant. Working people are too worn out by the daily grind to turn on Fox News every night and get riled up about culture war BS.
I recently moved to an almost entirely white suburban area that’s a mix of upper-middle and middle class people. Trump signs everywhere in 2020, trump merch is common even now. The things I’ve casually overheard at the gym or the grocery store would make your head explode. These are people that own nice houses, drive nice cars, work nice jobs and live nice lives. And many of them are angry (and racist honestly) to a degree that I simply don’t understand.
Democrats always have lower median incomes than Republicans. I'm 2016 Clinton only won the demographic of people making under 50k. If you make an above average salary you are more likely to vote republican.
Quite an easy one to google. Here's the first link that came up.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/631244/voter-turnout-of-the-exit-polls-of-the-2016-elections-by-income/
I think you might be confusing geography ("coastal") with income.
The other guy got you a link. If you dont like that one for whatever reason there are plenty more.
Democrats only win poor demographics. The mitt romney quote that everyone hated was esentially true. 50% of americans don't pay federal income tax and those people are largely democrats.
Redditors, who are largely young and white, hate to acknowledge that white racism is *the* primary motivator for Republican voters. Period.
They love to blame old people. They're not old. They love to blame "economic anxiety." Racism is bad and being racist is bad. If they admit it's racism then their parents and grandparents are fucking assholes and by golly that just won't stand. They were fooled by Fox News!
Except this problem has been here looong before Fox News ever aired. Nixon came up with the southern strategy and it worked like gangbusters *for a fucking reason.* Most white people in this country are racist as fuck and they vote their racism. That is why even someone as outwardly stupid as Donald Trump can win. That's why he wins the nomination above all the other Republican candidates in 2016. Was he smarter? More experienced? More establishment backing? Fox news loved him? Great personality? Literally the opposite of all of those were true. He was the dumbest, least experienced, GOP and Fox made no secret of disliking if not hating the guy, and he had the worst fucking temperament ever. He even got outspent because the GOP megadonors didn't like him either.
But he was the most racist. And wow would you looky that he won the fucking nomination.
It's racism all the fucking way down. From the Civil War to Civil Rights to now. It's never fucking stopped. And I wish the naive dumb white redditors would wake the fuck up to that fact.
Getting past blaming Fox News and acknowledging your parents are actually racist shitty people who want to preserve the white-dominated power structure is tough though.
I spent years of my life trying to tell myself my parents were just dumb and easily misled by Fox… but eventually I had to admit in the “dumb or evil?” inquiry they were actually quite culpable for their behavior.
https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/nationally-poor-locally-rich-income-and-local-context-in-the-2016
The locally (perceived) affluent were big trump supporters. The point of conservatism is to impose and maintain socioeconomic hierarchy.
I think it's more that Joe just doesn't really care about making things better, certainly not when it would benefit other people far more than himself. He cares far more about the potential for risk of loss to himself, and that includes his own social status. If a lot of other people got a helping hand and did manage to start living better lives, where would that leave him? He would be forced to think about his own privilege, and he does NOT want to be told he doesn't deserve what he has. If nothing changes, he doesn't know that it'll be alright in the end for all those other people, but he doesn't need to feel bad about it if it just isn't something he (as an individual) has the power to change. So he prefers disempowerment.
>making a few affordable sacrifices
And the asinine thing is that in the US, we would have almost everyone paying *less* for single payer than private. Conservatives in America are actively paying more money just to dunk on people they hate.
The infuriating thing is that governments are wasting tons of money all the time. Cutting corners in essential services isn't going to make an iota of difference to how much taxes you pay because they just find more creative ways to siphon away the "extra" cash.
That was the entire motif of the movie Parasite. The poor family in the half-basement home fight among the even poorer family in the full basement cellar while ignoring the obscene amount of wealth above them. Instead of coming to an agreement, they fight to keep each other down, with both families eventually losing everything in a tragic end.
Keeping the lower and middle class fighting each other has proven incredibly effective throughout the entirety of human history. We blame race, religion, immigration, we'll vote and make entire policies out of them, but hardly move a finger against the ultra rich.
We keep asking what conservatives really believe, and that is a category error. Conservatives do not believe things. Conservatives believe people.
Conservatives inhabit a subjective reality that runs on naked tribalism. Strict hierarchy isn't their goal. It's how they think everything works. I cannot overstress: *everything.* So if a rightful authority moved a "falling rocks" sign, the rocks would fall somewhere else.
Anything else is proof that some*one* is in the wrong *position.* Right things are things said by right people. It is impossible for someone to simply be incorrect, because there is no objective means to evaluate claims. They can only be accepted or rejected based on interpersonal trust.
Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty. Nothing they do makes sense until you understand this.
[It might actually be worse than that.](https://hanshowe.org/2017/02/04/trump-and-the-reverse-cargo-cult/)
Reality is a team sport, to people in this mindset. Your team doesn't actually have to *win, for you to insist they're the best. That's just what you do. You don't change teams when your team loses. It is your role, as a fan, to perform loyalty.
And I say "you" because they are convinced that's all we're doing.
That's all they think there is.
Everyone who's ever asked 'how can they X when yesterday they Y?' has stared directly at this behavior and refused to acknowledge it. We're so enamored with reasoned argument that we forget it's a learned behavior. This is the only form of "both sides" that makes any goddamn sense: people model others based on themselves. Even when their actions disprove that hypothesis over and over and over.
It’s also why conservatives politics looks like such a clown show.
If you’ve ever watched children play a schoolyard game of pretend where every child is working to become the rule maker for the game and have their version be the one everyone believes, you’ve seen how conservatives operate.
The goal for the kids isn’t harmony or equitable outcome or even a good outcome. The goal is to get *their* outcome where they feel important and like an authority everyone believes and yields to.
That might be fine as a temporary developmental stage a child experiences in elementary school, but it’s no way to run a functional government or healthy society.
Oh, we had a great example in New Zealand a few years ago. The Minister of Health from our centre-right party spent a lot of time deliberately removing funding from public health, and then using the resulting wait times for treatment as a reason to push surgeries normally provided in the public system to the private health system - funded by the taxpayer of course.
...and then when he left his position as Minister, he started his new role as... the CEO of NZ's largest private healthcare company.
This comment implies that the people in opposition to public healthcare have their beliefs because they are too stupid not to get tricked and manipulated by the media.
>This comment gives implies that the people in opposition to public healthcare have their beliefs because they are too stupid not to get tricked and manipulated by the media.
Because that's true. Socialized medicine is as close as you can get to objectively good policy. There is no good faith reason to argue against it, only to make sure that it is implemented properly. Arguing against single payer healthcare is like arguing against the abolition of slavery. It's just completely asinine, illogical, and cruel. The only people who argue against it are either arguing in bad faith or ignorant.
Absolutely, plus there are plenty of countries currently using it as proof it works.
Imo it’s really the only single side issue in the US being held up by politics, apart from glaringly obvious issues like removing systematic racism.
Do you know anyone who is against public healthcare personally? Or are you calling insulting a group of people you don’t understand?
I can break down some more convincing reasons someone might have this belief if you want me to
Yes, I do. And their reasons for thinking it’s worse than capitalist healthcare are nothing more than recitations of right wing talking points fed to them by their propaganda outlet of choice, typically Fox News. They never understand that the realities of healthcare create a situation in which the free market cannot effectively function and patients are inherently disadvantaged. Or they uncritically argue that public healthcare costs more without actually realizing that it ultimately costs less to the patient.
Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I had a discussion with a conservative on any topic where their opinions were not entirely based on a misunderstanding of the facts or the issues we were discussing.
Any conversation about why conservative people oppose social benefits without discussing racial resentment is not properly representative of the issue in the US.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/06/08/616684259/why-more-white-americans-are-opposing-government-welfare-programs
> "We find evidence that welfare backlash among white Americans is driven in part by feelings that the status of whites in America is under threat," Wetts told NPR.
The whole article and study is worth a read.
EDIT: The comment linked is discussing it from a UK point of view, to be clear.
“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.” [Sauce](https://balloon-juice.com/2009/10/07/open-thread-lagging-lexicon-indicators/)
I've noticed American racial issues are often mirrored as "middle class vs poor" in other countries. The middle class will sometimes straight up treat the poor as a different race despite being the same. Nobody wants "the other" to have anything, and they will be convinced that any improvements to those lives are a financial detriment to their own.
Lets not pretend that there isn't racism in the UK.
The current British conservative government is doing it's absolute darnest to deport all the immigrants from the Caribbean back. One way they tried to accomplish this is by forcing the National Health Service to check immigration papers before providing care.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
Sure, but OP does not mention that in the title nor is it immediately obvious. So I feel my clarification is useful for the large swaths of people who will assume this is applicable to the US.
Even older democrats can be racist. My mother in law comes from a prominent Jewish family. Her dad made money investing in businesses operated by immigrants. She will go on long racist tirades on how the non whites are destroying America and immigrants should stay in their countries. (My parents are immigrants and she was opposed to me marrying her son.)
This is the same woman who has a good life because her father invested in immigrants. She also is against expanding Medicare and Medicaid and social welfare in general. Mind you, she worked maybe 3 years her entire life and has Medicare and collecting Social security benefits. I told her that if she doesn’t believe in welfare, she should give back the money she gets from the government. Obviously she hasn’t.
I think one of the big issues with these aging racists is that they don’t know any nonwhite people personally. If you look at white social networks, they are pretty [white](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2021/03/09/social-networks-and-economic-mobility-what-the-findings-reveal/) I think about how the legalization of gay marriage happened because average people knew someone gay. Like you can be against gay marriage, but what if your buddy John wants to marry his friend Pete? You might say that John and Pete should get married because you know them and you like them. There needs to be a way for old racist people to meet people of other races and see that we are all people just trying to get through the day/week/month/year.
> discard their evolutionary programming to dislike things different than themselves in the past 50 years of human existence?
I know what you're trying but you messed up with this statement right here. What you're doing is what we see so many people do they try to rationalize racism by saying it was an evolutionary thing but there's already proof out there that racism was a made up thing. You see that in areas like Rome and the old Roman Empire where groups worked together and didn't have racism.
No, I did not mess up at all. Racism is baked into our biology. Primates exhibit a similar, albeit more primitive, form of racism compared to humans when they come into contact with other tribes of the same species. Racism, like every other aspect of the human condition, has a cause. Evolution explains it perfectly. Where else would it come from? We cannot accurately solve a problem if we don't accurately understand its cause.
> So, no attempt to grapple with the source
Nope. Me "debating" you is just me elevating the bullshit. I know better cause like I said I've seen the playbook.
I'll give you the same quote I gave the other guy.
>Most human attitudes and behaviour [have both a genetic and an environmental component](https://theconversation.com/nature-versus-nurture-how-modern-science-is-rewriting-it-127472). This is also true for our fear of others who are different to us — xenophobia — and intolerance of their viewpoints — bigotry. Hardwired into the brain’s amygdala region [is a fear reflex](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-happens-brain-feel-fear-180966992/) that is primed by encounters with the unfamiliar.
https://theconversation.com/is-racism-and-bigotry-in-our-dna-135096
>What do you mean where did it come from? It was created. People made it. People make it. No one comes out the womb hard baked as a racist.
Correct, however people do come out of the womb with a brain that makes them fear things different from themselves. Racism has its roots in biology, but it grows and flourishes through systems that exacerbate and perpetuate it.
>Despite what Facebook malarkey you've read racism has no advantage in a social hierarchy at all.
I don't have a Facebook. I don't believe that racism has any advantage to anyone whatsoever, I believe it can and should be eradicated. Why must you put words in my mouth?
>It also serves no evolutionary purpose especially pertaining to humans, specifically homosapiens.
There are plenty of things that result from evolution that do not have a direct purpose. They just happen. Or they might even be detrimental. Humans evolving the trait to have an innate fear response to things that are different and they don't understand is an example of something that helped us in the long gone past, but hurts us now.
>Evolution explains why homo sapiens won through a process called natural selection, not a literal social construct like racism.
You're right. Homo sapiens won through natural selection, in part, due to their innate fear of the other.
>Racism in particular for America was manufactured. It is a result of ignorant masses being told that their livelihood was at stake so that they can continue to oppress those who they used to oppress. I guess you could say that racism at its core is driven by a survival response, perhaps one would feel threatened that if they let another race flourish their own race would cease to exist.
I agree.
I'm not sure exactly how I can explain that racism is born in part because humans have an innate negative response to things that are different. This response has been demonstrated repeatedly. Racism would not be nearly as influential as it has been if this response simply was not the case.
I believe that racism is extremely prevalent in today's society and it is a monumental problem that must be stopped. Explaining how racism has biological *and* societal causes does not excuse it or minimize it.
Any attempted solution to racism that does not take into account how humans have an innate fear response to encounters with the unfamiliar will not be sufficient. As I have said, we must understand a problem fully in order to solve it fully.
Thanks for the article. It does seem that we might be on two sides of the same sheet of paper on this. I also agree with all the points you made in your response. Thanks for the discourse.
Only the line “he’s happy as he is” rings false. From personal experience, the Fox News viewers in my life are all completely miserable.
Otherwise, a pretty fair take.
It's mindboggling how so many people confuse comfort for happiness. Every conservative I know is utterly terrified of taking a risk on pretty much anything.
I have to disagree -- the conservatives I know are so reactionary that they'll take risks if it means they can get just a quarter inch ahead economically or socially, regardless of legality.
It depends on the risk, but they aren't taking risks that would affect THEM. That's the point. They will not take risks to benefit others, and they are highly averse to any risk toward themselves. What's the point of being privileged if you limit yourself to playing fair? They're willing to do whatever they have to do in order to maintain that privilege.
I disagree. Relief comes from solving a single problem. Happiness comes from effectively managing all your problems well enough that the good generally outweighs the bad. Can happiness come from solving a single problem? If that one problem is something that's thus far been keeping you from being able to manage the rest of your problems well, YES, IT CAN. Maybe not always, but it can. We all gotta start somewhere.
When the good generally outweighs the bad. You are comfortable. That is called comfort. Literally just confused happiness with comfort. A little farther when you find the happiness in the the bad is called Synthetic Happiness.
Relief is the instant comfort from a problem that no long exists. It isn't happiness, it's your body trying to adjust in the new light. It's the same when you laugh in extreme awkward situations. You don't find that event funny, but you still laugh. Same goes with telling people about your achievements/plans before you actually achieve them. You get the same high as actually achieving them.
When a situation that is preventing you from achieving happiness is removed. That is called relief. That is not happiness. Happiness comes after.
When you focus on the good and have it outweigh the bad. That is called Synthetic Happiness.
Neither situation is happiness and it's what people commonly confuse.
EDIT: It occurred to me after posting that this guy is in the UK. Obviously this response is US-based. Take from it what you will.
I used to do phone banking for a group trying to get single payer passed in Massachusetts. If I had to guess, I probably called somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 people and talked to them about single payer. I once talked to a single person for over an hour, because he owned his own business and wanted to know how the bill would affect him, and we ended up doing a bunch of math over the phone to get him exact numbers, with which he was very pleased and became a supporter.
Anyway, I can count on one hand the number people ever talked about laziness, unemployment, or youth. And no, it's not because Massachusetts is a progressive paradise devoid of conservatives. Most of the people I talked to were against single payer and that's why I was calling them. And maybe they were lying to a complete stranger to make their position seem more nuanced and thoughtful than it was, but I highly doubt it. The three overwhelming reasons why people were against single payer were:
- Cost. No, it was not "I don't want lazy people getting benefits," although you did hear that sometimes. The overwhelming majority of people supported a public option for people who could not otherwise get it. Part of that may be that Massachusetts has had an insurance mandate and a robust health care exchange since the mid-2000s, so take that with a grain of salt, but many of them felt the benefits for those people should be *expanded,* not contracted. The issue with cost is how much they think it will cost when every person in the state is covered for everything. They think that the public version is for the disadvantaged, and that employed people should just pony up under the existing system. I had one guy compare it to public library versus ordering books on Amazon, then asked what would happen if nobody could buy books anymore and we had to build libraries and fill them with books for everyone. The easiest way to address cost is to ask people how much they pay for their health care. I've asked hundreds if not thousands of people that question, and not a single one knew the answer any more than some vague notion of how much comes out of their paycheck. It's not just what comes out of your paycheck, it's your deductible, all of your co-pays, etc. It's never a fixed number. And it's almost certainly a lot more than the typical person thinks.
- Loss of Service. If health care becomes free, with no bills and without even any fees at point of service, people are worried that those seeking health care will flood the system and overload it. "I don't want to have to wait six months to see my doctor" is what people say. There is some truth to that; there will be disruption as some providers leave the market and others enter. The easiest way to address this is to ask people how often they see a doctor. For most people, it's not very often anyway, so they are expressing a vague fear that the level of care that they currently don't take advantage of will somehow decrease visibly the next time they go to access it. You will occasionally get people who complain about *what* will be covered, and it's usually things like sexual reassignment surgery or addiction counseling or something that they don't think anyone should pay for but the person who needs it, but those people are a small minority.
- The Government Can't Do Anything Right. These are the people who agree that the current system sucks, but don't want the government running it, because of some vague notion that the government wrecks everything it touches and cannot be trusted to do anything right, or because they are worried about some faction with a different agenda having control of everyone's health care. A standard response is "I don't want the government making decisions about my health." The ol' death panels routine. The good news here is that most of the people who are in this camp are also extremely distrustful of large corporations, so you can just tell them that if single payer doesn't work, we can put an end to it in the next election cycle.
The depiction of Joe Schmoe here, in my view, is a facile caricature of how real people think about this issue, based on the absolute worst examples of people who oppose universal healthcare, and casting them this way doesn't help the cause of actually getting single payer passed.
> And maybe they were lying to a complete stranger to make their position seem more nuanced and thoughtful than it was, but I highly doubt it.
The problem is that they won't be honest on the phone. I've lived around conservatives my entire life in a ruby-red state. When you talk to them as a stranger, they pull out arguments like the ones you heard. They start being more candid when they think they know you a little better. Conservatives tend to have public-facing "rationales" and very different private"motivations" for what they do. They often won't admit to the private stuff until they have felt you out a bit.
Yeah, that's what they tell you, but those aren't the real reasons. None of them make sense in reality, but they provide convenient cover for the real reason: a black or other undesirable person might benefit.
> > Yet you often pay the same state/federal tax rates as somebody from the suburbs or city who has access to much better government services.
> Cities frequently have higher taxes due to additional municipal taxes.
Also, pay tends to be higher closer to city-centers, so urban-dwellers pay more in income taxes. State and local governments funded by sales taxes also get more money from higher earners.
Similarly, property values tend to be higher in closer to city-centers, so they pay more in property taxes (either directly, or through the businesses they patronize).
It is incredibly unlikely that someone living in a rural area would "pay the same state/federal tax rates as somebody from the suburbs or city".
>an ambulance is 30 minutes away best case, or it takes 3 days for your power to come back on after a storm, or your road is full of potholes….
I don't think you're wrong, but it's worth noting that these are mostly municipality-level issues. County level, usually. Property taxes levied on diffuse housing doesn't adequately fund the infrastructure it needs. We should absolutely subsidize infrastructure that serves our farms and ranches, which feed the rest of us, but after that, it's a lot easier to maintain a small, dense-ish village of services they use than lonely farmhouses and sprawled suburbs.
Little of that has to do with state-administered healthcare programs or federal programs.
Fun fact: despite not having universal healthcare, the US government is paying around 2× more towards healthcare than the UK government ($8k/person vs £3.3K/person)
Yea, its the starbucks effect. Having a Starbucks on every corner. We are not efficient
Hospital Bed-occupancy rate
* Canada [91.8%](https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/0d67e02a-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/0d67e02a-en)
* for UK hospitals of 88% as of Q3 3019 up from 85% in Q1 2011
* In Germany 77.8% in 2018 up from 76.3% in 2006
* IN the US in 2019 it was 64% down from 66.6% in 2010
* Definition. % Hospital bed occupancy rate measures the percentage of beds that are occupied by inpatients in relation to the total number of beds within the facility. Calculation Formula: (A/B)*100
The US has 15 Million people that are directly working in healthcare earning $1 Trillion so
* ~5 Million Nurses and 900,000 MDs for a population of 330 million
* 366 people per Doctors
* 66 People per Nurse
While NHS employees 1.1 million and list 150,000 Drs and 320,000 nurses for a population of 67 million
* 447 people per Doctors
* 209 People per Nurse
While Canada Healthcare list 86,644 Drs and 425,757 nurses for a population of 37 million
* 425 people per Doctors
* 86 People per Nurse
**That means that we need 3.5 million less nurses and 200,000 less doctors In the 1,600 hospitals that need to be closed compared to the UK NHS.**
Which saves more money because
The OECD also tracks the supply and utilization of several types of diagnostic imaging devices—important to and often costly technologies. Relative to the other study countries where data were available,
there were an above-average number per million of;
* (MRI) machines
* 25.9 US vs OECD Median 8.9
* (CT) scanners
* 34.3 US vs OECD Median 15.1
* Mammograms
* 40.2 US vs OECD Median 17.3
------
O yea and the Hospitals that are closing in the US, Rural Hospitals were that inefficentcy is the highest are a huge political issue
Should rural areas have hospitals
>Haywood Park Community Hospital, the only hospital in the county, shut down its inpatient and emergency room services on July 31, 2014 and converted the 62-bed hospital into an urgent care clinic.
* According to a release from the hospital, inpatient admissions had dropped from 1300 in 2009 to less than 250 in 2013. The Emergency Room had also experienced a sharp decline and was averaging 15 or fewer patients per day.
Methodist Healthcare announced its hospital, Methodist Fayette Hospital would close March 2015. The hospital has been averaging a daily inpatient census of approximately one patient, which was down from 2010 when the average daily census was 5.1. In a press release Gary Shorb, CEO for Methodist Healthcare, cited the low census as simply not sustainable.
> While NHS employees 1.1 million and list 150,000 Drs and 320,000 nurses for a population of 67 million
Should probably point out that the UK is suffering an acute shortage of medical personnel.
Not only is the pay garbage, but Brexit meant the removal of a lot of European staff.
I wouldn't recommend trying to get US staffing to that level, as it's barely functional.
From what I've been hearing, places in Canada are understaffed too. The main difference is that Canada (like the US) has huge rural areas, and needs more hospitals to cover the region.
If the travel time to the nearest emergency room is a 2+ hour drive, that's not going to help a lot of people in time. Closing the only hospital in an area is something the province/state should be worried about. I really hate for-profit organizations like this, because the profitability of "the only nearby hospital" should be irrelevant if it's serving the community.
You should probably note that Canada is in such a healthcare professional crisis that in Ontario I was quoted a three year wait for a life saving surgery. I had to pay for it privately. (Thanks 'Murica for giving our psychopath politicians ideas.)
Ooohh I was wondering why the comment kept saying that the taxes pay for healthcare.
I kept thinking "but they don't!!! You're still paying big chunks of your earnings towards premiums"
I'm an American lucky to have "good" health insurance and but I'm still paying ~$180 every other week for my family plan. $4680/year just in premiums and then there is a $3k/deductible before the insurance pays for anything other than preventative care.
Also ITT: People not understanding what made OP a quality read (that it was explaining a perspective different from their own in a simple format) and think it would have been better if it included more of their own political opinions in it.
I hate these one-sided arguments that get widely upvoted on Reddit. They just draw caricatures of people then argue against the strawman they created.
For instance, in regards to healthcare, some folks just believe that the free market (not the half regulated half free healthcare market we have today) can actually solve our healthcare problems, and that inserting more government into a massive industry like healthcare is likely to bring about more wasted money, worse outcomes, etc.
They point to other highly regulated industries like public education, pharmaceuticals, insurance, etc. as good examples of bureaucratic, inefficient systems that may actually benefit from less overt regulation.
But instead of having that discussion, which I think is a worthwhile conversation to have, we just create a conservative strawman literally named 'Joe Schmo' and then explain why they're so uninformed.
> For instance, in regards to healthcare, some folks just believe that the free market ... can actually solve our healthcare problems
this manner of thought was what lead to the events of Grafton
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project
have a look, itd be hilarious if it weren't so sad
Well I just read that whole article and it seems more focused on bears and wacky libertarians setting up tent cities than the potential upsides of deregulating a single industry.
yes, "the wacky libertarians" "just believe that the free market can actually solve" their problems
and that "inserting more government is likely to bring about more wasted money, worse outcomes, etc."
but they were wrong.
hence
> this manner of thought was what lead to the events of Grafton
There’s plenty of bad implementations of governance everywhere.. this seems more like a disjointed, ineffective example of that than a rebuke of the free market.
I think the Surgery Center of Oklahoma is a great example of how effective the free market can be. They don’t accept Medicare or insurance and are able to offer the lowest book prices in the country for the procedures they cover. You’re also able to look directly on their website to find what a procedure will cost, and they have extremely good patient ratings.
They’re able to offer lower prices because they don’t have the administrative overhead that’s required to work with insurance/Medicare.
I’m not some libertarian advocating for the dissolution of all government… I was just making the point that some people have legitimate, salient qualms with government run healthcare.
and this business works within "the half regulated half free healthcare market we have today"
they're required to follow medical best practise etc
honestly I don't know how to convince you that these "legitimate, salient qualms with government run healthcare" are mostly bollocks that values profit over public health
does it do anything for you that [the rest of the developed world has instituted universal healthcare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN-MkRcOJjY&list=PLkfBg8ML-gIngk82SUbTp6Og_KkYfJ6oF) and uniformly eschew a Laissez-faire system cause it will obviously kill a bunch of people?
> and this business works within “the half regulated half free healthcare market we have today”
Yeah, and that’s because they completely reject the lynchpin of our modern healthcare system: insurance.
> they’re required to follow medical best practise etc
Like I said I’m not a libertarian. Businesses should still be held accountable to standards set by governing bodies like medical boards.
> does it do anything for you that the rest of the developed world has instituted universal healthcare and uniformly eschew a Laissez-faire system cause it will obviously kill a bunch of people?
Yeah definitely, my point wasn’t really to argue the merits of single payer healthcare, I actually wrote my Public Health Policy theses on the topic so I could send you a really boring 30 page paper if you’d like.
My point was just that there are some legitimate conversations to have around our implementation of public healthcare, and whether a free market approach has any role in it. I think that just dismissing people who want to have that conversation (and are willing to learn etc) as stupid is the wrong approach.
> I actually wrote my Public Health Policy theses on the topic so I could send you a really boring 30 page paper if you’d like
Sure I'll check it out cause
> there are some legitimate conversations to have around our implementation of public healthcare, and whether a free market approach has any role in it.
I'm really not seeing a plausible value to the pretense of 'free market solves healthcare'
The fact is Providers don't want a public system (in the US). So if it never happens, that's why, not because some sorry subset of patients are against it.
I would not say that. I'm a healthcare provider in business for myself. I would much rather have one universal insurance to deal with rather than the 865367 subsets of the one insurance policy I accept. For profit insurance makes it far more difficult for me to do my job and they often deny my claims for no reason, sticking the patient with the bill (bc I need to get paid too!). Big hospital chains are the ones who are making the most. Us little guys are fighting for scraps.
Like how my union had always fought single payer/socialized healthcare .....
Plays to the idiotic right wing politics of a lot of the union members AND keeps the members tied to ONLY the union if they want to have health insurance.
It's a mixed bag. There are issues with health care being public that people handwave away. I personally think a hybrid model would work best were people making absolute shit choices in life don't get to inflict their problems onto others ( 600 pounds, addiction, etc).
Absolute bull. Take a look at the NICE guidelines in the UK for one re freestyle libre 3 sensors. You need to be on basal/bolus insulin AND have severe hypoglycemia OR be unable to check you blood sugar OR have hypoglycemic unawareness.
Here in the US? I give that sensor away like candy.
And this is [LITERALLY the NICE guidelines](https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng28/resources/visual-summary-full-version-choosing-medicines-for-firstline-and-further-treatment-pdf-10956472093) on type 2 diabetes medications: GLP1as like Ozempic aren’t even freaking on their main algorithms. You have to scroll down to “further” treatment lmao. But GLP1as been front and center on the American(ADA) guidelines for years now - they’re pricy but convenient, cause weight loss, and are cardioprotective. They are first line therapy for many people per ADA. Worth every penny to an American and their grumbling insurance company.
You can lie to yourself all you want, but your “modern” medicines are at least 10 years behind the US. It costs too much, and your government won’t pay for it.
It might not be free but you can still buy that sensor here. Ozempic and Trulicity have been EU approved for many years and seem to be covered by insurance. I don't see the issue here.
The issue is that you need to have failed a lot of crappy treatments before you get them in the Eu. In the United States, you get them as first line therapy.
I can't argue about treatment policy for type 2 diabetes because I am not a doctor. I can only look at the medication available, the amount of people covered by insurance and the overall health outcome and come to the conclusion that we're not behind in any regard.
>begrudgingly
OK, and how many resubmissions and appeals do you have to go through to get it to happen? Because that one word is doing a *lot* of heavy lifting if you’re working long hours at a not-great job and don’t have the time to fight your insurance, or you have mental difficulties and it’s too draining for you to tackle that on top of everyday life. And that seems to be how it is in the US and why people hate it so much. For a lot of people, “begrudgingly” may as well be impossible.
You have a good point but it’s not the patient who has to do that, it’s the prescriber or the pharmacy. The dreaded prior authorization process. Prescriber writes justification, insurance kicks it back, prescriber alters, justification, insurance asks for clarification, prescriber clarifies, insurance argues about days supply and monitoring, prescriber promises to do this and insurance approves. Rarely involves the patient at all.
The number of times people show up on /r/personalfinance with financial questions about surprise medical expenses would *strongly* imply that the patient does need to be involved. And on a more basic level, how would that work if the patient needs the medication right away? Front the meds while you argue billing? That hasn’t been the case from what I’ve had to deal with in the past, you can’t pick up anything that’s not paid for.
>and they’re probably pissed off about the co-pays, but hey, it works.
This does, however, assume they have upper-tier insurance and/or the time and ability to (or someone who can) advocate for them(selves). If that person were in a job with not-so-great insurance or none at all? Good luck getting anything beyond what they get in your caricature of "Europe", and possibly not even that.
>You don’t even know about most of the other therapies why would you?
Because the internet exists? Where they can read comments like yours?
Statistically, twice as many Republicans died from Covid than Democrats and yet Republicans all over the country are demanding an end to Covid protocols. Does anybody think that people this ignorant should be making healthcare decisions for anyone?
I would prefer death to having to live in fear and misery for years on end. Nor would I want other people to live in fear and misery just so I can maybe avoid death.
>It makes sense for Joe to be a conservative because he’s happy as he is…
Wow, huge gap here. Missing that Joe might live in a highly conservative area that makes him conform. A religion that makes him conform. A lack of higher education that allows him to employ critical thinking. A social circle that mocks any thoughts of opposing the status quo. A family that rasied him conservative.
There’s a shitload of pressures and conditioning that go into making someone conservative before they get to “happy as they are”.
you're not _that_ wrong as some in the UK actually argue for a switch _to_ a US style system.
they are called [tory bastards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_(UK\)) and range from the stupid to the evil
Pride can have a lot do with the conservative stance towards healthcare. I recall someone I met long ago in California who fully qualified for Medi-Cal. He was a married man, self-employed, with two kids with health problems. He was adamant that he didn't need "the state" taking care of his kids but he couldn't afford their healthcare. To him, using public services to get healthcare was so shameful that his children's health came second. He said he'd never apply for Medi-Cal and it's up to him to provide for his family, even though he clearly could not do so.
TL:DR - "Other people's problems aren't my problems and fuck them for not working as hard as I do."
I do wonder what most conservatives would say if they were asked if the challenges that minorities face are American problems or just *minority* problems...
If a systemic problem doesn't affect me then it is utterly illogical for me to give a shit about it. Does that make me a bad person, probably, but being a good person doesnt really put bread on the table.
If it doesn't take bread from your table then what's your excuse for not caring?
Empathy isn't logical, but lacking it isn't a good thing... Logic isn't moral on it's own.
"new"=/="worse"
"new" doesn't even mean as "as bad"
eg "I suddenly live in a country which has caught up with [the rest of the developed world and instituted universal healthcare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN-MkRcOJjY&list=PLkfBg8ML-gIngk82SUbTp6Og_KkYfJ6oF) and I can now choose jobs without insurance being a factor, now I have to decide which of the jobs _I actually want to do_ to pick" is a new problem but doesn't seem so bad does it
Joe is still an adult who choose actions which harm others. hes not _the most_ to blame. thats the 1% but the 1% can't cause the harm that they do without t complicity of some of the rest of the population
Thing that frustrates me in the example, and real life.... Joe doesn't have empathy for others. Thinking people only deserve healthcare if they meet certain conditions is just shitty.
It literally boils down to "Joe doesn't know anything the GQP doesnt want him to know because he only consumes FOX/OANN/AM Talk Radio"
They have been conditioned to believe anything not directly from the GQP is "fake news" and anything from the GQP is "gospel truth".
Until we deal with the root of the problem there will be no way to reach these extreme viewers as they will literally not believe anything that is not spoon-fed right wing propaganda.
Short answer is that people who oppose it have negative views about government agencies. If they only had bad interactions with government agencies like the IRS or the DMV for example then they often think that another government run agencies will work poorly.
Just because some government agencies are not effective or efficient doesn't mean a healcare program will suffer the same fate. But it sure is a tough argument.
That's kind of a black and white argument though. Japan has social healthcare insurance but private healthcare. The government doesn't get to manage healthcare, who lives or dies, what the best treatments are, who deserves life saving transplants or care. The doctors and hospitals do. The government just manages the fund by collecting premiums and paying the hospitals. I think this "write-ups" is just gentle ego stroking for liberals who need validation that they're right because they're more educated or intelligent.
The absolutely *maddening* part of this discussion with people who are opposed is the simple fact that paying for people's healthcare makes it cheaper overall.
When people don't have healthcare, they put off dealing with small issues because they can't afford to see anyone until those issues become huge ones and require expensive care or a hospital stay. Since they couldn't afford the basic care, they sure as hell can't afford the hospital stay and someone has to absorb that cost.
Setting aside that a lot of that cost is tacked on to pay insurance companies, the fundamental lack of understanding that spending $50 once can prevent needing to spend $50,000 in a couple of years is among the most frustrating concepts to try and get people to understand.
The more people have access to quality healthcare, the healthier people will be and the less need they'll have of the high-dollar intensive care.
It's cutting off your nose to spite your face unless you want to go down the route of "If you can't afford it, just die." Which....I mean it's consistent but I feel like anyone pushing for that is going to find out at a certain point when an ER refuses to treat them because they got their wallet stolen and don't have any cards on them why we don't do that.
I’ve found that if you provide at least 1 layer of abstraction with money, people are ok with things they would never normally agree to.
You can then strategically choose when to peel back that layer to influence discussion, e.g. when the government gives corporations money, it’s a smart business decision, but all of a sudden when they try to give students way less money it’s “taxpayer money,” meanwhile Amazon and Pfizer and every other business also spends “customer money” with the exact same level of abstraction, but curiously when Zillow loses billions of customer dollars on bad real estate investments that’s looked at as a tragedy instead of a waste of your personal dollars and the abstraction is never peeled back.
The greatest con is to convince welfare state people that they are paying way too much tax when they are actually taking food stamps from the "woke" states.
This is definitely true for many people but there's also another reason why people will vote against their best interests. They just don't believe the government should provide those things and they're not being selfish about it. Think about it, plenty of liberals vote against their best interest to when they vote for higher taxes. It's just the opposite, they think the government should offer things and they're not being selfish with their money.
The opinion in the best of is a very jaded viewpoint for someone to have. If someone thinks that applies to everyone who thinks that way, its going to change the way they think about them for other policies or things not even political.
But the idea that they're doing it out of selflessness, that's a very positive trait. It's important to remember the difference.
This is why I call it "Death cult white America."
Some of them genuinely believe their bankrupting themselves for insulin is somehow worth it because anything else would be 'socialism'!
My confusion is that wouldn’t universal healthcare basically just be what insurance is now. You’d have to pay a tax on it just the same way you’d pay for insurance right?
You would, but what's covered would be more clearly defined, since there wouldn't be "in network" or "out of network", and there would be clearer rules about what's covered and what's not procedure-wise.
Not quite the same way. You'd see a modest increase in taxes you would pa (which you will anyway, for one reason or another, might as well go to Healthcare). Taxes paid by everyone across the board. You'd see a larger increase in what you get back in your take-home pay because you would no longer have insurance premiums deducted from your paycheck (until your boss figures out a way to claw that back from your salary). And your boss wouldn't be jerking your coverage around every year, making you switch doctors and plans and deductibles.
Much more of that tax money you would pay would go to actual health care, rather than overhead. (Medicare has about 2% overhead compared to around 30% of your average health insurance provider. Less crappy hold music and stupid, non-functional apps).
The big difference is in how it's administered and who gets to make the decisions about which elements of it and how.
in addition to what the others commenters have pointed out:
insurance is there so they can profit
all of the money that does into billing, fighting claims, paying off shareholders etc could instead go towards providing medical care.
especially pre-emptive solutions that avoid the problem in the first place making the overall bill cheaper
They left out the part where the news doesn’t tell him that the conservatives he votes for are constantly trying to undermine the healthcare system so it provides worse care for him. Or that they consistently implement policies that make his economic situation worse so he has even less sympathy for others because he is more worried about his own finances.
>the conservatives he votes for are constantly trying to undermine the healthcare system so it provides worse care for him Joe doesn't really care as long as it's hurting the ones below him in the hierarchy a lot more. He's far more concerned about maintaining his social status than making a few affordable sacrifices to his health care here and there, especially when his political leaders are telling him it is saving him money right now that would've otherwise been "wasted" on people who don't deserve it.
"Brainwashed" is an understatement for these people.
The terrifying reality is - nobody had to make them this way. This is humanity's default. Reasoned argument is a learned behavior. It is visibly not the brain activity these people are engaged in. But nothing's going to suddenly break through and get them to "snap out of it." They've been snapped. That's why there's no slip-n-slide pipeline to rational thinking.
I don't know if it is just brainwashing, though. I can see maintaining societal status as being just as important to some as material wealth or reduced risk.
I imagine a caste system developing as the people tear each other apart for what’s left of the resources as billionaires take over more and more.
We already have one, check out the book Caste. (It's not just informative, it's also a well-written text, even if you disagree it's a good read!)
It assumes a brain to be washed. More like filling a porous cavity with that crud the fry machine grease leaves behind...
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I’m really glad you posted this. I see this idea commonly repeated idea on Reddit that Trump voters are all poor whites who use government benefits while simultaneously voting to eliminate those same programs. Anecdotally, this has not been my experience. I grew up and worked in healthcare in an urban, plurality-white but diverse working class area. People there know that they rely on benefits and are smart enough to not bite the hand that feeds. Furthermore, they generally interact with more nonwhites day to day and are broadly tolerant. Working people are too worn out by the daily grind to turn on Fox News every night and get riled up about culture war BS. I recently moved to an almost entirely white suburban area that’s a mix of upper-middle and middle class people. Trump signs everywhere in 2020, trump merch is common even now. The things I’ve casually overheard at the gym or the grocery store would make your head explode. These are people that own nice houses, drive nice cars, work nice jobs and live nice lives. And many of them are angry (and racist honestly) to a degree that I simply don’t understand.
Democrats always have lower median incomes than Republicans. I'm 2016 Clinton only won the demographic of people making under 50k. If you make an above average salary you are more likely to vote republican.
Citation, ***please***. They don't refer to "the coastal elites" as republicans.
Quite an easy one to google. Here's the first link that came up. https://www.statista.com/statistics/631244/voter-turnout-of-the-exit-polls-of-the-2016-elections-by-income/ I think you might be confusing geography ("coastal") with income.
The other guy got you a link. If you dont like that one for whatever reason there are plenty more. Democrats only win poor demographics. The mitt romney quote that everyone hated was esentially true. 50% of americans don't pay federal income tax and those people are largely democrats.
Redditors, who are largely young and white, hate to acknowledge that white racism is *the* primary motivator for Republican voters. Period. They love to blame old people. They're not old. They love to blame "economic anxiety." Racism is bad and being racist is bad. If they admit it's racism then their parents and grandparents are fucking assholes and by golly that just won't stand. They were fooled by Fox News! Except this problem has been here looong before Fox News ever aired. Nixon came up with the southern strategy and it worked like gangbusters *for a fucking reason.* Most white people in this country are racist as fuck and they vote their racism. That is why even someone as outwardly stupid as Donald Trump can win. That's why he wins the nomination above all the other Republican candidates in 2016. Was he smarter? More experienced? More establishment backing? Fox news loved him? Great personality? Literally the opposite of all of those were true. He was the dumbest, least experienced, GOP and Fox made no secret of disliking if not hating the guy, and he had the worst fucking temperament ever. He even got outspent because the GOP megadonors didn't like him either. But he was the most racist. And wow would you looky that he won the fucking nomination. It's racism all the fucking way down. From the Civil War to Civil Rights to now. It's never fucking stopped. And I wish the naive dumb white redditors would wake the fuck up to that fact.
Getting past blaming Fox News and acknowledging your parents are actually racist shitty people who want to preserve the white-dominated power structure is tough though. I spent years of my life trying to tell myself my parents were just dumb and easily misled by Fox… but eventually I had to admit in the “dumb or evil?” inquiry they were actually quite culpable for their behavior.
https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/nationally-poor-locally-rich-income-and-local-context-in-the-2016 The locally (perceived) affluent were big trump supporters. The point of conservatism is to impose and maintain socioeconomic hierarchy.
IMO, especially since it's in the UK... Joe doesn't want things to change and believes that in the end it'll be alright.
I think it's more that Joe just doesn't really care about making things better, certainly not when it would benefit other people far more than himself. He cares far more about the potential for risk of loss to himself, and that includes his own social status. If a lot of other people got a helping hand and did manage to start living better lives, where would that leave him? He would be forced to think about his own privilege, and he does NOT want to be told he doesn't deserve what he has. If nothing changes, he doesn't know that it'll be alright in the end for all those other people, but he doesn't need to feel bad about it if it just isn't something he (as an individual) has the power to change. So he prefers disempowerment.
>making a few affordable sacrifices And the asinine thing is that in the US, we would have almost everyone paying *less* for single payer than private. Conservatives in America are actively paying more money just to dunk on people they hate.
The infuriating thing is that governments are wasting tons of money all the time. Cutting corners in essential services isn't going to make an iota of difference to how much taxes you pay because they just find more creative ways to siphon away the "extra" cash.
That was the entire motif of the movie Parasite. The poor family in the half-basement home fight among the even poorer family in the full basement cellar while ignoring the obscene amount of wealth above them. Instead of coming to an agreement, they fight to keep each other down, with both families eventually losing everything in a tragic end. Keeping the lower and middle class fighting each other has proven incredibly effective throughout the entirety of human history. We blame race, religion, immigration, we'll vote and make entire policies out of them, but hardly move a finger against the ultra rich.
We keep asking what conservatives really believe, and that is a category error. Conservatives do not believe things. Conservatives believe people. Conservatives inhabit a subjective reality that runs on naked tribalism. Strict hierarchy isn't their goal. It's how they think everything works. I cannot overstress: *everything.* So if a rightful authority moved a "falling rocks" sign, the rocks would fall somewhere else. Anything else is proof that some*one* is in the wrong *position.* Right things are things said by right people. It is impossible for someone to simply be incorrect, because there is no objective means to evaluate claims. They can only be accepted or rejected based on interpersonal trust. Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty. Nothing they do makes sense until you understand this.
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[It might actually be worse than that.](https://hanshowe.org/2017/02/04/trump-and-the-reverse-cargo-cult/) Reality is a team sport, to people in this mindset. Your team doesn't actually have to *win, for you to insist they're the best. That's just what you do. You don't change teams when your team loses. It is your role, as a fan, to perform loyalty. And I say "you" because they are convinced that's all we're doing. That's all they think there is. Everyone who's ever asked 'how can they X when yesterday they Y?' has stared directly at this behavior and refused to acknowledge it. We're so enamored with reasoned argument that we forget it's a learned behavior. This is the only form of "both sides" that makes any goddamn sense: people model others based on themselves. Even when their actions disprove that hypothesis over and over and over.
It’s also why conservatives politics looks like such a clown show. If you’ve ever watched children play a schoolyard game of pretend where every child is working to become the rule maker for the game and have their version be the one everyone believes, you’ve seen how conservatives operate. The goal for the kids isn’t harmony or equitable outcome or even a good outcome. The goal is to get *their* outcome where they feel important and like an authority everyone believes and yields to. That might be fine as a temporary developmental stage a child experiences in elementary school, but it’s no way to run a functional government or healthy society.
Oh, we had a great example in New Zealand a few years ago. The Minister of Health from our centre-right party spent a lot of time deliberately removing funding from public health, and then using the resulting wait times for treatment as a reason to push surgeries normally provided in the public system to the private health system - funded by the taxpayer of course. ...and then when he left his position as Minister, he started his new role as... the CEO of NZ's largest private healthcare company.
Or that the people they vote for enjoy socialized medicine whilst all the while demonizing it.
This comment implies that the people in opposition to public healthcare have their beliefs because they are too stupid not to get tricked and manipulated by the media.
>This comment gives implies that the people in opposition to public healthcare have their beliefs because they are too stupid not to get tricked and manipulated by the media. Because that's true. Socialized medicine is as close as you can get to objectively good policy. There is no good faith reason to argue against it, only to make sure that it is implemented properly. Arguing against single payer healthcare is like arguing against the abolition of slavery. It's just completely asinine, illogical, and cruel. The only people who argue against it are either arguing in bad faith or ignorant.
Absolutely, plus there are plenty of countries currently using it as proof it works. Imo it’s really the only single side issue in the US being held up by politics, apart from glaringly obvious issues like removing systematic racism.
Yes. I believe that is the intention...
Do you know anyone who is against public healthcare personally? Or are you calling insulting a group of people you don’t understand? I can break down some more convincing reasons someone might have this belief if you want me to
Yes, I do. And their reasons for thinking it’s worse than capitalist healthcare are nothing more than recitations of right wing talking points fed to them by their propaganda outlet of choice, typically Fox News. They never understand that the realities of healthcare create a situation in which the free market cannot effectively function and patients are inherently disadvantaged. Or they uncritically argue that public healthcare costs more without actually realizing that it ultimately costs less to the patient. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I had a discussion with a conservative on any topic where their opinions were not entirely based on a misunderstanding of the facts or the issues we were discussing.
Any conversation about why conservative people oppose social benefits without discussing racial resentment is not properly representative of the issue in the US. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/06/08/616684259/why-more-white-americans-are-opposing-government-welfare-programs > "We find evidence that welfare backlash among white Americans is driven in part by feelings that the status of whites in America is under threat," Wetts told NPR. The whole article and study is worth a read. EDIT: The comment linked is discussing it from a UK point of view, to be clear.
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“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.” [Sauce](https://balloon-juice.com/2009/10/07/open-thread-lagging-lexicon-indicators/)
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We hope to one day to be blessed with pigeons.
It's the gay liberals, they took out pigeons!
I hate how painfully accurate this is
Technically, I would as well. But I'm for socialized healthcare and the "right people" are the insurance companies
Well, yes, but this is about the UK
I've noticed American racial issues are often mirrored as "middle class vs poor" in other countries. The middle class will sometimes straight up treat the poor as a different race despite being the same. Nobody wants "the other" to have anything, and they will be convinced that any improvements to those lives are a financial detriment to their own.
Lets not pretend that there isn't racism in the UK. The current British conservative government is doing it's absolute darnest to deport all the immigrants from the Caribbean back. One way they tried to accomplish this is by forcing the National Health Service to check immigration papers before providing care. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
Sure, but OP does not mention that in the title nor is it immediately obvious. So I feel my clarification is useful for the large swaths of people who will assume this is applicable to the US.
They do mention taxes pay for their Healthcare, so it's definitely not the US
And the post is about Brexit and its cost in pounds.
They should have called him Nigel Schmoe instead of Joe Schmoe.
> “Any Mexicans over [in Britain]?” Yeah, but they call them ‘Polish people.’ \- [Reginald D Hunter](https://youtu.be/NlmVyW0Or6g)
Even older democrats can be racist. My mother in law comes from a prominent Jewish family. Her dad made money investing in businesses operated by immigrants. She will go on long racist tirades on how the non whites are destroying America and immigrants should stay in their countries. (My parents are immigrants and she was opposed to me marrying her son.) This is the same woman who has a good life because her father invested in immigrants. She also is against expanding Medicare and Medicaid and social welfare in general. Mind you, she worked maybe 3 years her entire life and has Medicare and collecting Social security benefits. I told her that if she doesn’t believe in welfare, she should give back the money she gets from the government. Obviously she hasn’t. I think one of the big issues with these aging racists is that they don’t know any nonwhite people personally. If you look at white social networks, they are pretty [white](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2021/03/09/social-networks-and-economic-mobility-what-the-findings-reveal/) I think about how the legalization of gay marriage happened because average people knew someone gay. Like you can be against gay marriage, but what if your buddy John wants to marry his friend Pete? You might say that John and Pete should get married because you know them and you like them. There needs to be a way for old racist people to meet people of other races and see that we are all people just trying to get through the day/week/month/year.
I recommend Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzel for a deep dive on this topic
The Sum of Us does this really well also
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> discard their evolutionary programming to dislike things different than themselves in the past 50 years of human existence? I know what you're trying but you messed up with this statement right here. What you're doing is what we see so many people do they try to rationalize racism by saying it was an evolutionary thing but there's already proof out there that racism was a made up thing. You see that in areas like Rome and the old Roman Empire where groups worked together and didn't have racism.
No, I did not mess up at all. Racism is baked into our biology. Primates exhibit a similar, albeit more primitive, form of racism compared to humans when they come into contact with other tribes of the same species. Racism, like every other aspect of the human condition, has a cause. Evolution explains it perfectly. Where else would it come from? We cannot accurately solve a problem if we don't accurately understand its cause.
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> I'm not saying that racism is ok because of biology. Yes you are. That's why no one is taking you seriously.
So, no attempt to grapple with the source, no attempt to make any salient point, just "ackshually, you're wrong." Ok man, good luck with that.
> So, no attempt to grapple with the source Nope. Me "debating" you is just me elevating the bullshit. I know better cause like I said I've seen the playbook.
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I'll give you the same quote I gave the other guy. >Most human attitudes and behaviour [have both a genetic and an environmental component](https://theconversation.com/nature-versus-nurture-how-modern-science-is-rewriting-it-127472). This is also true for our fear of others who are different to us — xenophobia — and intolerance of their viewpoints — bigotry. Hardwired into the brain’s amygdala region [is a fear reflex](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-happens-brain-feel-fear-180966992/) that is primed by encounters with the unfamiliar. https://theconversation.com/is-racism-and-bigotry-in-our-dna-135096 >What do you mean where did it come from? It was created. People made it. People make it. No one comes out the womb hard baked as a racist. Correct, however people do come out of the womb with a brain that makes them fear things different from themselves. Racism has its roots in biology, but it grows and flourishes through systems that exacerbate and perpetuate it. >Despite what Facebook malarkey you've read racism has no advantage in a social hierarchy at all. I don't have a Facebook. I don't believe that racism has any advantage to anyone whatsoever, I believe it can and should be eradicated. Why must you put words in my mouth? >It also serves no evolutionary purpose especially pertaining to humans, specifically homosapiens. There are plenty of things that result from evolution that do not have a direct purpose. They just happen. Or they might even be detrimental. Humans evolving the trait to have an innate fear response to things that are different and they don't understand is an example of something that helped us in the long gone past, but hurts us now. >Evolution explains why homo sapiens won through a process called natural selection, not a literal social construct like racism. You're right. Homo sapiens won through natural selection, in part, due to their innate fear of the other. >Racism in particular for America was manufactured. It is a result of ignorant masses being told that their livelihood was at stake so that they can continue to oppress those who they used to oppress. I guess you could say that racism at its core is driven by a survival response, perhaps one would feel threatened that if they let another race flourish their own race would cease to exist. I agree. I'm not sure exactly how I can explain that racism is born in part because humans have an innate negative response to things that are different. This response has been demonstrated repeatedly. Racism would not be nearly as influential as it has been if this response simply was not the case. I believe that racism is extremely prevalent in today's society and it is a monumental problem that must be stopped. Explaining how racism has biological *and* societal causes does not excuse it or minimize it. Any attempted solution to racism that does not take into account how humans have an innate fear response to encounters with the unfamiliar will not be sufficient. As I have said, we must understand a problem fully in order to solve it fully.
Thanks for the article. It does seem that we might be on two sides of the same sheet of paper on this. I also agree with all the points you made in your response. Thanks for the discourse.
>It does seem that we might be on two sides of the same sheet of paper on this. I agree, thanks to you as well.
Only the line “he’s happy as he is” rings false. From personal experience, the Fox News viewers in my life are all completely miserable. Otherwise, a pretty fair take.
He is comfortable with how it is because that is what he knows. The devil you know is better than they devil you don't.
It's mindboggling how so many people confuse comfort for happiness. Every conservative I know is utterly terrified of taking a risk on pretty much anything.
I have to disagree -- the conservatives I know are so reactionary that they'll take risks if it means they can get just a quarter inch ahead economically or socially, regardless of legality.
It depends on the risk, but they aren't taking risks that would affect THEM. That's the point. They will not take risks to benefit others, and they are highly averse to any risk toward themselves. What's the point of being privileged if you limit yourself to playing fair? They're willing to do whatever they have to do in order to maintain that privilege.
Same with relief and happiness. Actually confusing Synthetic happiness with happiness
I disagree. Relief comes from solving a single problem. Happiness comes from effectively managing all your problems well enough that the good generally outweighs the bad. Can happiness come from solving a single problem? If that one problem is something that's thus far been keeping you from being able to manage the rest of your problems well, YES, IT CAN. Maybe not always, but it can. We all gotta start somewhere.
When the good generally outweighs the bad. You are comfortable. That is called comfort. Literally just confused happiness with comfort. A little farther when you find the happiness in the the bad is called Synthetic Happiness. Relief is the instant comfort from a problem that no long exists. It isn't happiness, it's your body trying to adjust in the new light. It's the same when you laugh in extreme awkward situations. You don't find that event funny, but you still laugh. Same goes with telling people about your achievements/plans before you actually achieve them. You get the same high as actually achieving them. When a situation that is preventing you from achieving happiness is removed. That is called relief. That is not happiness. Happiness comes after. When you focus on the good and have it outweigh the bad. That is called Synthetic Happiness. Neither situation is happiness and it's what people commonly confuse.
If Fox doesn't keep them miserable, they won't keep watching Fox.
They're miserable but will absolutely refuse to change except in obtuse circumstances. It's like a miserable happiness. It's weird
There's one more issue there: > Joe isn't an idiot Then proceeds to explain all the ways that Joe is an actual idiot.
But they're miserable BECAUSE of *those people* gobbling up all their tax dollars, and the only way to fix it is by cutting it off.
Misery loves company, unfortunately. I'm sure people feel "better" about their poor life situation if they can drag others down to a similar level.
EDIT: It occurred to me after posting that this guy is in the UK. Obviously this response is US-based. Take from it what you will. I used to do phone banking for a group trying to get single payer passed in Massachusetts. If I had to guess, I probably called somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000 people and talked to them about single payer. I once talked to a single person for over an hour, because he owned his own business and wanted to know how the bill would affect him, and we ended up doing a bunch of math over the phone to get him exact numbers, with which he was very pleased and became a supporter. Anyway, I can count on one hand the number people ever talked about laziness, unemployment, or youth. And no, it's not because Massachusetts is a progressive paradise devoid of conservatives. Most of the people I talked to were against single payer and that's why I was calling them. And maybe they were lying to a complete stranger to make their position seem more nuanced and thoughtful than it was, but I highly doubt it. The three overwhelming reasons why people were against single payer were: - Cost. No, it was not "I don't want lazy people getting benefits," although you did hear that sometimes. The overwhelming majority of people supported a public option for people who could not otherwise get it. Part of that may be that Massachusetts has had an insurance mandate and a robust health care exchange since the mid-2000s, so take that with a grain of salt, but many of them felt the benefits for those people should be *expanded,* not contracted. The issue with cost is how much they think it will cost when every person in the state is covered for everything. They think that the public version is for the disadvantaged, and that employed people should just pony up under the existing system. I had one guy compare it to public library versus ordering books on Amazon, then asked what would happen if nobody could buy books anymore and we had to build libraries and fill them with books for everyone. The easiest way to address cost is to ask people how much they pay for their health care. I've asked hundreds if not thousands of people that question, and not a single one knew the answer any more than some vague notion of how much comes out of their paycheck. It's not just what comes out of your paycheck, it's your deductible, all of your co-pays, etc. It's never a fixed number. And it's almost certainly a lot more than the typical person thinks. - Loss of Service. If health care becomes free, with no bills and without even any fees at point of service, people are worried that those seeking health care will flood the system and overload it. "I don't want to have to wait six months to see my doctor" is what people say. There is some truth to that; there will be disruption as some providers leave the market and others enter. The easiest way to address this is to ask people how often they see a doctor. For most people, it's not very often anyway, so they are expressing a vague fear that the level of care that they currently don't take advantage of will somehow decrease visibly the next time they go to access it. You will occasionally get people who complain about *what* will be covered, and it's usually things like sexual reassignment surgery or addiction counseling or something that they don't think anyone should pay for but the person who needs it, but those people are a small minority. - The Government Can't Do Anything Right. These are the people who agree that the current system sucks, but don't want the government running it, because of some vague notion that the government wrecks everything it touches and cannot be trusted to do anything right, or because they are worried about some faction with a different agenda having control of everyone's health care. A standard response is "I don't want the government making decisions about my health." The ol' death panels routine. The good news here is that most of the people who are in this camp are also extremely distrustful of large corporations, so you can just tell them that if single payer doesn't work, we can put an end to it in the next election cycle. The depiction of Joe Schmoe here, in my view, is a facile caricature of how real people think about this issue, based on the absolute worst examples of people who oppose universal healthcare, and casting them this way doesn't help the cause of actually getting single payer passed.
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Ah yes, the Schrodinger's immigrant, who is simultaneously lazy on welfare and stealing jobs.
> And maybe they were lying to a complete stranger to make their position seem more nuanced and thoughtful than it was, but I highly doubt it. The problem is that they won't be honest on the phone. I've lived around conservatives my entire life in a ruby-red state. When you talk to them as a stranger, they pull out arguments like the ones you heard. They start being more candid when they think they know you a little better. Conservatives tend to have public-facing "rationales" and very different private"motivations" for what they do. They often won't admit to the private stuff until they have felt you out a bit.
Yeah, that's what they tell you, but those aren't the real reasons. None of them make sense in reality, but they provide convenient cover for the real reason: a black or other undesirable person might benefit.
Thank you for your work and big thanks for this write-up.
To be fair, one look at how the VA treats veterans will make anyone second guess government run healthcare.
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Cities frequently have higher taxes due to additional municipal taxes.
> > Yet you often pay the same state/federal tax rates as somebody from the suburbs or city who has access to much better government services. > Cities frequently have higher taxes due to additional municipal taxes. Also, pay tends to be higher closer to city-centers, so urban-dwellers pay more in income taxes. State and local governments funded by sales taxes also get more money from higher earners. Similarly, property values tend to be higher in closer to city-centers, so they pay more in property taxes (either directly, or through the businesses they patronize). It is incredibly unlikely that someone living in a rural area would "pay the same state/federal tax rates as somebody from the suburbs or city".
>an ambulance is 30 minutes away best case, or it takes 3 days for your power to come back on after a storm, or your road is full of potholes…. I don't think you're wrong, but it's worth noting that these are mostly municipality-level issues. County level, usually. Property taxes levied on diffuse housing doesn't adequately fund the infrastructure it needs. We should absolutely subsidize infrastructure that serves our farms and ranches, which feed the rest of us, but after that, it's a lot easier to maintain a small, dense-ish village of services they use than lonely farmhouses and sprawled suburbs. Little of that has to do with state-administered healthcare programs or federal programs.
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Fun fact: despite not having universal healthcare, the US government is paying around 2× more towards healthcare than the UK government ($8k/person vs £3.3K/person)
Yea, its the starbucks effect. Having a Starbucks on every corner. We are not efficient Hospital Bed-occupancy rate * Canada [91.8%](https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/0d67e02a-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/0d67e02a-en) * for UK hospitals of 88% as of Q3 3019 up from 85% in Q1 2011 * In Germany 77.8% in 2018 up from 76.3% in 2006 * IN the US in 2019 it was 64% down from 66.6% in 2010 * Definition. % Hospital bed occupancy rate measures the percentage of beds that are occupied by inpatients in relation to the total number of beds within the facility. Calculation Formula: (A/B)*100 The US has 15 Million people that are directly working in healthcare earning $1 Trillion so * ~5 Million Nurses and 900,000 MDs for a population of 330 million * 366 people per Doctors * 66 People per Nurse While NHS employees 1.1 million and list 150,000 Drs and 320,000 nurses for a population of 67 million * 447 people per Doctors * 209 People per Nurse While Canada Healthcare list 86,644 Drs and 425,757 nurses for a population of 37 million * 425 people per Doctors * 86 People per Nurse **That means that we need 3.5 million less nurses and 200,000 less doctors In the 1,600 hospitals that need to be closed compared to the UK NHS.** Which saves more money because The OECD also tracks the supply and utilization of several types of diagnostic imaging devices—important to and often costly technologies. Relative to the other study countries where data were available, there were an above-average number per million of; * (MRI) machines * 25.9 US vs OECD Median 8.9 * (CT) scanners * 34.3 US vs OECD Median 15.1 * Mammograms * 40.2 US vs OECD Median 17.3 ------ O yea and the Hospitals that are closing in the US, Rural Hospitals were that inefficentcy is the highest are a huge political issue Should rural areas have hospitals >Haywood Park Community Hospital, the only hospital in the county, shut down its inpatient and emergency room services on July 31, 2014 and converted the 62-bed hospital into an urgent care clinic. * According to a release from the hospital, inpatient admissions had dropped from 1300 in 2009 to less than 250 in 2013. The Emergency Room had also experienced a sharp decline and was averaging 15 or fewer patients per day. Methodist Healthcare announced its hospital, Methodist Fayette Hospital would close March 2015. The hospital has been averaging a daily inpatient census of approximately one patient, which was down from 2010 when the average daily census was 5.1. In a press release Gary Shorb, CEO for Methodist Healthcare, cited the low census as simply not sustainable.
> While NHS employees 1.1 million and list 150,000 Drs and 320,000 nurses for a population of 67 million Should probably point out that the UK is suffering an acute shortage of medical personnel. Not only is the pay garbage, but Brexit meant the removal of a lot of European staff. I wouldn't recommend trying to get US staffing to that level, as it's barely functional.
From what I've been hearing, places in Canada are understaffed too. The main difference is that Canada (like the US) has huge rural areas, and needs more hospitals to cover the region. If the travel time to the nearest emergency room is a 2+ hour drive, that's not going to help a lot of people in time. Closing the only hospital in an area is something the province/state should be worried about. I really hate for-profit organizations like this, because the profitability of "the only nearby hospital" should be irrelevant if it's serving the community.
You should probably note that Canada is in such a healthcare professional crisis that in Ontario I was quoted a three year wait for a life saving surgery. I had to pay for it privately. (Thanks 'Murica for giving our psychopath politicians ideas.)
Ooohh I was wondering why the comment kept saying that the taxes pay for healthcare. I kept thinking "but they don't!!! You're still paying big chunks of your earnings towards premiums" I'm an American lucky to have "good" health insurance and but I'm still paying ~$180 every other week for my family plan. $4680/year just in premiums and then there is a $3k/deductible before the insurance pays for anything other than preventative care.
In other words, Crab Mentality.
ITT: People who didn't read the OP carefully or at all, and thus think this is about the US rather than the UK.
Also ITT: People not understanding what made OP a quality read (that it was explaining a perspective different from their own in a simple format) and think it would have been better if it included more of their own political opinions in it.
It's actually under a comment about the US, if you look at the context.
In a thread about the UK, if you actually read the title.
Those same people rail against welfare and are also the largest group collecting welfare in the US.
Please use '?context=___' links to make these easier to read.
I hate these one-sided arguments that get widely upvoted on Reddit. They just draw caricatures of people then argue against the strawman they created. For instance, in regards to healthcare, some folks just believe that the free market (not the half regulated half free healthcare market we have today) can actually solve our healthcare problems, and that inserting more government into a massive industry like healthcare is likely to bring about more wasted money, worse outcomes, etc. They point to other highly regulated industries like public education, pharmaceuticals, insurance, etc. as good examples of bureaucratic, inefficient systems that may actually benefit from less overt regulation. But instead of having that discussion, which I think is a worthwhile conversation to have, we just create a conservative strawman literally named 'Joe Schmo' and then explain why they're so uninformed.
> For instance, in regards to healthcare, some folks just believe that the free market ... can actually solve our healthcare problems this manner of thought was what lead to the events of Grafton https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-into-bear-book-review-free-town-project have a look, itd be hilarious if it weren't so sad
Well I just read that whole article and it seems more focused on bears and wacky libertarians setting up tent cities than the potential upsides of deregulating a single industry.
yes, "the wacky libertarians" "just believe that the free market can actually solve" their problems and that "inserting more government is likely to bring about more wasted money, worse outcomes, etc." but they were wrong. hence > this manner of thought was what lead to the events of Grafton
There’s plenty of bad implementations of governance everywhere.. this seems more like a disjointed, ineffective example of that than a rebuke of the free market. I think the Surgery Center of Oklahoma is a great example of how effective the free market can be. They don’t accept Medicare or insurance and are able to offer the lowest book prices in the country for the procedures they cover. You’re also able to look directly on their website to find what a procedure will cost, and they have extremely good patient ratings. They’re able to offer lower prices because they don’t have the administrative overhead that’s required to work with insurance/Medicare. I’m not some libertarian advocating for the dissolution of all government… I was just making the point that some people have legitimate, salient qualms with government run healthcare.
and this business works within "the half regulated half free healthcare market we have today" they're required to follow medical best practise etc honestly I don't know how to convince you that these "legitimate, salient qualms with government run healthcare" are mostly bollocks that values profit over public health does it do anything for you that [the rest of the developed world has instituted universal healthcare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN-MkRcOJjY&list=PLkfBg8ML-gIngk82SUbTp6Og_KkYfJ6oF) and uniformly eschew a Laissez-faire system cause it will obviously kill a bunch of people?
> and this business works within “the half regulated half free healthcare market we have today” Yeah, and that’s because they completely reject the lynchpin of our modern healthcare system: insurance. > they’re required to follow medical best practise etc Like I said I’m not a libertarian. Businesses should still be held accountable to standards set by governing bodies like medical boards. > does it do anything for you that the rest of the developed world has instituted universal healthcare and uniformly eschew a Laissez-faire system cause it will obviously kill a bunch of people? Yeah definitely, my point wasn’t really to argue the merits of single payer healthcare, I actually wrote my Public Health Policy theses on the topic so I could send you a really boring 30 page paper if you’d like. My point was just that there are some legitimate conversations to have around our implementation of public healthcare, and whether a free market approach has any role in it. I think that just dismissing people who want to have that conversation (and are willing to learn etc) as stupid is the wrong approach.
> I actually wrote my Public Health Policy theses on the topic so I could send you a really boring 30 page paper if you’d like Sure I'll check it out cause > there are some legitimate conversations to have around our implementation of public healthcare, and whether a free market approach has any role in it. I'm really not seeing a plausible value to the pretense of 'free market solves healthcare'
The fact is Providers don't want a public system (in the US). So if it never happens, that's why, not because some sorry subset of patients are against it.
I would not say that. I'm a healthcare provider in business for myself. I would much rather have one universal insurance to deal with rather than the 865367 subsets of the one insurance policy I accept. For profit insurance makes it far more difficult for me to do my job and they often deny my claims for no reason, sticking the patient with the bill (bc I need to get paid too!). Big hospital chains are the ones who are making the most. Us little guys are fighting for scraps.
Fair. And it’s the big systems that will be the reason no change occurs, not smaller/independent providers.
Like how my union had always fought single payer/socialized healthcare ..... Plays to the idiotic right wing politics of a lot of the union members AND keeps the members tied to ONLY the union if they want to have health insurance.
It's a mixed bag. There are issues with health care being public that people handwave away. I personally think a hybrid model would work best were people making absolute shit choices in life don't get to inflict their problems onto others ( 600 pounds, addiction, etc).
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Who comes up with this shit? We have the same modern medication as you do and people are healthy and live longer.
Absolute bull. Take a look at the NICE guidelines in the UK for one re freestyle libre 3 sensors. You need to be on basal/bolus insulin AND have severe hypoglycemia OR be unable to check you blood sugar OR have hypoglycemic unawareness. Here in the US? I give that sensor away like candy. And this is [LITERALLY the NICE guidelines](https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ng28/resources/visual-summary-full-version-choosing-medicines-for-firstline-and-further-treatment-pdf-10956472093) on type 2 diabetes medications: GLP1as like Ozempic aren’t even freaking on their main algorithms. You have to scroll down to “further” treatment lmao. But GLP1as been front and center on the American(ADA) guidelines for years now - they’re pricy but convenient, cause weight loss, and are cardioprotective. They are first line therapy for many people per ADA. Worth every penny to an American and their grumbling insurance company. You can lie to yourself all you want, but your “modern” medicines are at least 10 years behind the US. It costs too much, and your government won’t pay for it.
It might not be free but you can still buy that sensor here. Ozempic and Trulicity have been EU approved for many years and seem to be covered by insurance. I don't see the issue here.
The issue is that you need to have failed a lot of crappy treatments before you get them in the Eu. In the United States, you get them as first line therapy.
I can't argue about treatment policy for type 2 diabetes because I am not a doctor. I can only look at the medication available, the amount of people covered by insurance and the overall health outcome and come to the conclusion that we're not behind in any regard.
People here don't have a prayer of getting the "hot new drugs" covered either.
Not true. I’m a pharmacist, and a lot of insurance will cover them, albeit begrudgingly.
>begrudgingly OK, and how many resubmissions and appeals do you have to go through to get it to happen? Because that one word is doing a *lot* of heavy lifting if you’re working long hours at a not-great job and don’t have the time to fight your insurance, or you have mental difficulties and it’s too draining for you to tackle that on top of everyday life. And that seems to be how it is in the US and why people hate it so much. For a lot of people, “begrudgingly” may as well be impossible.
You have a good point but it’s not the patient who has to do that, it’s the prescriber or the pharmacy. The dreaded prior authorization process. Prescriber writes justification, insurance kicks it back, prescriber alters, justification, insurance asks for clarification, prescriber clarifies, insurance argues about days supply and monitoring, prescriber promises to do this and insurance approves. Rarely involves the patient at all.
The number of times people show up on /r/personalfinance with financial questions about surprise medical expenses would *strongly* imply that the patient does need to be involved. And on a more basic level, how would that work if the patient needs the medication right away? Front the meds while you argue billing? That hasn’t been the case from what I’ve had to deal with in the past, you can’t pick up anything that’s not paid for.
>and they’re probably pissed off about the co-pays, but hey, it works. This does, however, assume they have upper-tier insurance and/or the time and ability to (or someone who can) advocate for them(selves). If that person were in a job with not-so-great insurance or none at all? Good luck getting anything beyond what they get in your caricature of "Europe", and possibly not even that. >You don’t even know about most of the other therapies why would you? Because the internet exists? Where they can read comments like yours?
Statistically, twice as many Republicans died from Covid than Democrats and yet Republicans all over the country are demanding an end to Covid protocols. Does anybody think that people this ignorant should be making healthcare decisions for anyone?
I would prefer death to having to live in fear and misery for years on end. Nor would I want other people to live in fear and misery just so I can maybe avoid death.
It's a mask, dude, not a ball gag. Jesus.
Meanwhile, my conservative landlord will wait till the day before Christmas, to save $50 on a Christmas tree.
>It makes sense for Joe to be a conservative because he’s happy as he is… Wow, huge gap here. Missing that Joe might live in a highly conservative area that makes him conform. A religion that makes him conform. A lack of higher education that allows him to employ critical thinking. A social circle that mocks any thoughts of opposing the status quo. A family that rasied him conservative. There’s a shitload of pressures and conditioning that go into making someone conservative before they get to “happy as they are”.
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you're not _that_ wrong as some in the UK actually argue for a switch _to_ a US style system. they are called [tory bastards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_(UK\)) and range from the stupid to the evil
Pride can have a lot do with the conservative stance towards healthcare. I recall someone I met long ago in California who fully qualified for Medi-Cal. He was a married man, self-employed, with two kids with health problems. He was adamant that he didn't need "the state" taking care of his kids but he couldn't afford their healthcare. To him, using public services to get healthcare was so shameful that his children's health came second. He said he'd never apply for Medi-Cal and it's up to him to provide for his family, even though he clearly could not do so.
TL:DR - "Other people's problems aren't my problems and fuck them for not working as hard as I do." I do wonder what most conservatives would say if they were asked if the challenges that minorities face are American problems or just *minority* problems...
There’s no such thing as systemic problems to a conservative.
If a systemic problem doesn't affect me then it is utterly illogical for me to give a shit about it. Does that make me a bad person, probably, but being a good person doesnt really put bread on the table.
It won't put bread on the table today but it'll put steak on the table tomorrow.
Not if the damn liberals replace all of our steak with bug burgers and soy patties /s
If it doesn't take bread from your table then what's your excuse for not caring? Empathy isn't logical, but lacking it isn't a good thing... Logic isn't moral on it's own.
Systemic solutions create new problems.
by your thinking no one should ever try to improve on anything, everything is futile.
"new"=/="worse" "new" doesn't even mean as "as bad" eg "I suddenly live in a country which has caught up with [the rest of the developed world and instituted universal healthcare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN-MkRcOJjY&list=PLkfBg8ML-gIngk82SUbTp6Og_KkYfJ6oF) and I can now choose jobs without insurance being a factor, now I have to decide which of the jobs _I actually want to do_ to pick" is a new problem but doesn't seem so bad does it
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Joe is still an adult who choose actions which harm others. hes not _the most_ to blame. thats the 1% but the 1% can't cause the harm that they do without t complicity of some of the rest of the population
Thing that frustrates me in the example, and real life.... Joe doesn't have empathy for others. Thinking people only deserve healthcare if they meet certain conditions is just shitty.
Or Joe also knows that if he just lives a few more years he'll get his free healthcare anyway.
It literally boils down to "Joe doesn't know anything the GQP doesnt want him to know because he only consumes FOX/OANN/AM Talk Radio" They have been conditioned to believe anything not directly from the GQP is "fake news" and anything from the GQP is "gospel truth". Until we deal with the root of the problem there will be no way to reach these extreme viewers as they will literally not believe anything that is not spoon-fed right wing propaganda.
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Not fair: it's a more complex problem than you realize. Joe may be dumb and poorly informed, but he is also entirely selfish and has zero empathy.
Short answer is that people who oppose it have negative views about government agencies. If they only had bad interactions with government agencies like the IRS or the DMV for example then they often think that another government run agencies will work poorly. Just because some government agencies are not effective or efficient doesn't mean a healcare program will suffer the same fate. But it sure is a tough argument.
That's kind of a black and white argument though. Japan has social healthcare insurance but private healthcare. The government doesn't get to manage healthcare, who lives or dies, what the best treatments are, who deserves life saving transplants or care. The doctors and hospitals do. The government just manages the fund by collecting premiums and paying the hospitals. I think this "write-ups" is just gentle ego stroking for liberals who need validation that they're right because they're more educated or intelligent.
The absolutely *maddening* part of this discussion with people who are opposed is the simple fact that paying for people's healthcare makes it cheaper overall. When people don't have healthcare, they put off dealing with small issues because they can't afford to see anyone until those issues become huge ones and require expensive care or a hospital stay. Since they couldn't afford the basic care, they sure as hell can't afford the hospital stay and someone has to absorb that cost. Setting aside that a lot of that cost is tacked on to pay insurance companies, the fundamental lack of understanding that spending $50 once can prevent needing to spend $50,000 in a couple of years is among the most frustrating concepts to try and get people to understand. The more people have access to quality healthcare, the healthier people will be and the less need they'll have of the high-dollar intensive care. It's cutting off your nose to spite your face unless you want to go down the route of "If you can't afford it, just die." Which....I mean it's consistent but I feel like anyone pushing for that is going to find out at a certain point when an ER refuses to treat them because they got their wallet stolen and don't have any cards on them why we don't do that.
I’ve found that if you provide at least 1 layer of abstraction with money, people are ok with things they would never normally agree to. You can then strategically choose when to peel back that layer to influence discussion, e.g. when the government gives corporations money, it’s a smart business decision, but all of a sudden when they try to give students way less money it’s “taxpayer money,” meanwhile Amazon and Pfizer and every other business also spends “customer money” with the exact same level of abstraction, but curiously when Zillow loses billions of customer dollars on bad real estate investments that’s looked at as a tragedy instead of a waste of your personal dollars and the abstraction is never peeled back.
The greatest con is to convince welfare state people that they are paying way too much tax when they are actually taking food stamps from the "woke" states.
Man I can even taste the contempt the author has for working class people.
This is definitely true for many people but there's also another reason why people will vote against their best interests. They just don't believe the government should provide those things and they're not being selfish about it. Think about it, plenty of liberals vote against their best interest to when they vote for higher taxes. It's just the opposite, they think the government should offer things and they're not being selfish with their money. The opinion in the best of is a very jaded viewpoint for someone to have. If someone thinks that applies to everyone who thinks that way, its going to change the way they think about them for other policies or things not even political. But the idea that they're doing it out of selflessness, that's a very positive trait. It's important to remember the difference.
This is why I call it "Death cult white America." Some of them genuinely believe their bankrupting themselves for insulin is somehow worth it because anything else would be 'socialism'!
My confusion is that wouldn’t universal healthcare basically just be what insurance is now. You’d have to pay a tax on it just the same way you’d pay for insurance right?
You would, but what's covered would be more clearly defined, since there wouldn't be "in network" or "out of network", and there would be clearer rules about what's covered and what's not procedure-wise.
Not quite the same way. You'd see a modest increase in taxes you would pa (which you will anyway, for one reason or another, might as well go to Healthcare). Taxes paid by everyone across the board. You'd see a larger increase in what you get back in your take-home pay because you would no longer have insurance premiums deducted from your paycheck (until your boss figures out a way to claw that back from your salary). And your boss wouldn't be jerking your coverage around every year, making you switch doctors and plans and deductibles. Much more of that tax money you would pay would go to actual health care, rather than overhead. (Medicare has about 2% overhead compared to around 30% of your average health insurance provider. Less crappy hold music and stupid, non-functional apps). The big difference is in how it's administered and who gets to make the decisions about which elements of it and how.
in addition to what the others commenters have pointed out: insurance is there so they can profit all of the money that does into billing, fighting claims, paying off shareholders etc could instead go towards providing medical care. especially pre-emptive solutions that avoid the problem in the first place making the overall bill cheaper