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Americans’ Self-Contradictory Views of Socialized Healthcare
Majorities want single-payer, but not from the government.
Eric Zuesse
58% of Americans want “Replacing the ACA with a federally funded healthcare program providing insurance for all Americans.” Only 37% oppose it. A tiny 5% have no opinion. That’s from a Gallup poll published 16 May 2016, “Majority in U.S. Support Idea of Fed-Funded Healthcare System.”
However, on 20 November 2014, Gallup headlined “Majority Say Not Gov’t Duty to Provide Healthcare for All” and reported that, “For the third consecutive year, a majority of Americans (52%) agree with the position that it is not the federal government’s responsibility to ensure that all Americans have healthcare coverage. Prior to the start of Barack Obama’s presidency in 2009, a majority of Americans consistently took the opposite view.” But if it’s “not the federal government’s responsibility to ensure that all Americans have healthcare coverage” (presumably meaning for all basic healthcare but not for vanity medical services such as “tucks” and other non-health-related medical services), then “a federally funded healthcare program providing insurance for all Americans” makes no real sense at all.
Is it likely that majorities really do want single-payer, but not from the government? Hardly: a gratuitous addition of stockholders’ profits into the costs for providing essential and economic-productivity-enhancing healthcare services that everyone should have access to if it’s really needed (lawfully prescribed etc.) will not only distort the incentives to medical-services providers (and so reduce both health and economic productivity), but will also waste the money of medical consumers (government or otherwise). But what about having ’non-profit’ firms provide the single-payer services? That cuts out profits, and so eliminates the distortions that stockholders’ wants will introduce into the providing of any services (wants such as stockbrokers have, who pump the investments that pay them the highest commissions, which necessarily harm their investors). However, the top executives even of ‘non-profit’ firms can pay themselves whatever their friends who sit on their board of trustees will approve; and so a ‘non-profit’ too can be, at least to that extent, a scam. (And, of course, in an entirely free market, there is no regulation and therefore scams will be routine; so, only crooks would want that, anyway.)
These are the reasons why the countries that have the highest life-expectancies, and therefore the best health-outcomes, are the same as the countries that have socialized basic healthcare services, paid for normally entirely through taxes and provided to all citizens as a basic human right instead of as a privilege that’s available only to individuals who can afford it. (Of course, “tucks” and such get charged extra to the patient.) The United States has by far the costliest health care in terms of not only what Americans pay for it but in terms of healthcare costs as a percentage of GDP, and yet the U.S. has the lowest life-expectancy of all OECD countries; the U.S. has the most-free-market healthcare, and also the worst healthcare, among all of the economically developed countries — all (except the U.S.) of which provide guaranteed basic healthcare services to all citizens: essential services free as a right, not charged as a privilege. America’s combination of the worst healthcare plus the by-far-costliest healthcare is no coincidence; and healthcare profits in America are the world’s highest, so, the present American system is terrific for those stockholders (whose firms hire the lobbyists and their politicians who write America’s healthcare-laws). Because basic healthcare in the United States is a privilege instead of a right, the U.S. is the only economically developed nation that does not have universal coverage, health insurance for 100% of its citizenry, healthcare as a guaranteed right instead of dependent upon the patient’s ability-to-pay. When Barack Obama entered the White House, the uninsured rate was 14.6%; when he left office it was 10.9%; the insured rate when he started was 85.4%, and it was 89.1% when he left office. His repeated promises of “universal coverage” were lies. His plan was in no way designed for “universal coverage”; that promise was just a lie.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
Americans’ Self-Contradictory Views of Socialized Healthcare was originally published on Washington's Blog
Source: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2017/03/americans-self-contradictory-views-socialized-healthcare.html
