Universal Healthcare Will Not Work

Editor's Note: Please be sure to read the update at the end

Wouldn’t it be great if healthcare were free? You would have saved that $300 they charged you to sew your finger back on that one time! You would save that $100 they charged you when you had Strep! You’d be able to go to the hospital for anything you wanted without having any money! Golly Gee Willickers that’d be The Bee’s Knees!

That’s great. Maybe you’ll start going when you have a cold, instead of staying at home with Orange Juice and Soup. Hell, it’s free, why not see a doctor?

Did you sneeze really hard and it made your head hurt for a minute? Oh my God! That might be cancer! An MRI would normally cost you over a grand, but hey! Free now! Let’s go!

Funny thing is, when you go to make an MRI appointment, they are booked for 3 months. Well… at least its free. I’ll wait.

3 months later you go in and they don’t find anything except that rock you shoved too far up your nose when you were 7. Your mind is finally at ease. At least it was free.

As you walk out of the MRI Imaging place, you overhear a nurse canceling an appointment because the patient died while waiting for the MRI.

1) When you make anything free, its quality is completely diminished to the minimum standard it needs to be to stay in business.

2) When you make something free, people who would not normally need that thing will go and get it anyway simply because it is free. When your doctor is overbooked, you get maybe 2 minutes with him. If he has time to see every patient because the place isn’t constantly packed with them, he can spend more time and care with each patient. Imagine you go in for a breast or testicular exam and your doctor has to rush through it because he has a waiting room full of angry patients. Would you be able to fully trust his cursory rushed examination?

3) When medical care is free, do you want to be in the waiting room bleeding, in pain waiting for the kid with a runny nose and the overprotective mother? Wouldn’t you think that runny nose might be safe at home right now if they had to pay for treatment? Hypochondria will kill thousands of Americans before they even leave the waiting room.

4) When Medical Care is free, what reason does any health professional need to use highest quality drugs, staff, and equipment? They may as well cut their costs as much as they can without being shut down. Minimum quality will be offered to all.

Get A Job

Democrats make Socialized Medicine sound great. I agree that no one should be without healthcare. That is why we have Medicaid. That is why we have Health Insurance available. If you want to receive quality healthcare at little to no cost, get a job with full health benefits. It’s not that difficult to find. If your job does not offer these benefits, you will generally get paid better. If not, find a new job.

Quality of Medical Care

I agree that no American should be allowed to die of treatable diseases and conditions. However:

Americans receive better healthcare than any country that uses Socialized Healthcare.

Medical Welfare

If you can’t afford treatment for a treatable condition you have, would you expect someone else should have to pay for it? The day I’m on my deathbed because I can’t afford chemo for the inevitable liver/skin cancer I’ll get at some point, I will say the same thing. I don’t want to die of cancer and I’m sure others don’t either. But I would never say it was okay for other people to be forced to pay for my treatment.

White Trash, Morbidly Obese, Drug Addicts, and other Willing Recipients of Your Tax Money

If you’ve ever been to a Wal-Mart or a Dollar Store you’ve seen the types of people whose medical care you would now be paying for with your taxes. White trash that doesn’t use condoms, alcoholics, drug addicts, smokers, and the morbidly obese. Why should you pay for these people to have medical care if they obviously have no regard for their own health? Why should you eat healthily, wear condoms, and stay away from harmful or addictive substances if you’ll still be paying for treatment for these problems? What would encourage these people to stop their bad habits if it costs them nothing?

Power To The People?

Finally, do you want to trust your health and well-being to politicians? What makes you think they know what’s best for you? What makes you think they care? Haven’t you noticed that Drug Companies contribute millions of dollars to political campaigns every year? Do you think they will be on your side or theirs?

When you blindly support a system that bestows power on politicians and bureaucrats, they will receive their orders from those with the most money – and this will not be you, your friends or your family. The power of government will be used against you as you are forced to use medicines or accept treatments from well-connected healthcare companies.

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Update: 3/13/2018

Wow. It’s amazing to come back to this post and read it now, knowing about all of these arguments being utter bullshit.

Let’s take my arguments down as quickly as possible:

1. “When you make anything free, its quality is completely diminished to the minimum standard it needs to be to stay in business.”
   Comcast cable service is certainly not free. “Minimum standards to stay in business” is pretty much universal for any product or service with a wide enough demographic of consumers. Reduced cost is no guarantee of diminished quality, the same way that increased cost is no guarantee of improved quality.
2. “When you make something free, people who would not normally need that thing will go and get it anyway”
   Yea, like all the times I went through the trouble of making extra doctor appointments once I got no deductible on my insurance. Everyone loves going to the dentist, and the only reason they don’t go every week is the expense! Sarcasm aside, preventative care is far cheaper for individuals than treatment. As someone who recently dodged diabetes, heart disease, and other major health issues related to obesity, I find it laughable that I could ever bend myself to think otherwise.
3. “When medical care is free, do you want to be in the waiting room bleeding, in pain waiting for the kid with a runny nose and the overprotective mother?”
   What? How does universal healthcare change the way medical professionals perform triage? I don’t even know how I made this connection.
4. “I agree that no American should be allowed to die of treatable diseases and conditions. However:”
   Not a great way to start a paragraph! The Cato Institute exists exclusively to justify idiotic right-wing beliefs and attempt to help bad arguments continue to muddy the waters of political discourse. The arguments being made by these quotes and links is that the healthcare system in the U.S. is actually just fine as-is. I don’t think I need to explain why that’s an idiotic statement.
5. “[General condescension about stereotypical people who don’t actually exist]”
   *facepalm*
6. I can’t wrap my head around the last few paragraphs. Politicians aren’t trustworthy because they’re in the pocket of healthcare companies… so we should just let the healthcare companies continue to do whatever they want…? What!? I wouldn’t even know how to argue with this person if I met them today.

This is one of the great things about keeping my blog for so long: I get to look back and see how much I’ve grown. Now I can leave this post up here like a time capsule and hopefully never forget how susceptible we all are to over-simplified solutions spoon-fed to us by plutocrats that want us to continue fighting over their scraps.

Now to lay awake at night and rake myself over the coals for what a stupid piece of shit I was. Then, I can speculate about all the things I say and believe today that I will later realize were stupid and shitty.

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Side Note: My update to this post took more thought and research than the original post did. Brandolini’s Law in action. At least I’m attempting to clean up my own mess, rather than making someone else do it.