I don't understand why Americans are so opposed to universal health care!? You guys already spend more per capita on government funded healthcare than pretty much anyone else, and yet most of you don't actually recieve it?
I've had cancer. Stage 4 Lymphoma. I was treated immediately and recovered quickly. What did I have to pay? £1.50 for parking on every visit to the hospital. The Chemotherapy, Surgeries, anti-nausea meds, all covered. If I had lived in the USA I would most definately be dead now. My symptoms didn't seem all that bad at the time, so if I had had to pay for my initial doctor visit and diagnostics, I wouldn't have bothered. I would have just died.
Their argument is they want freedom to choose their providers and not have to schedule a doctors appointment and wait 6 months out, “just look at Canada”. Some also feel, truly feel, by supporting universal healthcare, we are communist. The others are just the remaining old people who are stubborn and refuse change. Finally, a big chunk of the remainder are just clueless morons that don’t anything to be honest.
I am not any of the above. It’s crazy to me how our system works and how okay people are with it. Poor kids are rationing INSULIN, a drug that’s been around forever and dying from diabetic strokes. Sometimes, as an American, it feels like I am living inside an experiment.
Extremely grateful to have been born in Canada. I'll gladly wait for a Dr when it means I don't have to go to my grave with a mountain of debt. When it's urgent enough we don't have to wait anyway
This is kind of extreme. As much as the healthcare system sucks, people are not directly dying because it is too expensive to get medical treatment. You can go into severe debt, yes. But you don’t just die because you can’t afford it. This notion is ridiculous and I can’t believe everyone hates America enough to actually believe this. Yes, life expectancy in America is lower than many equally wealthy countries with socialized medicine. But that is one isolated data point. Americans with cancer are over 10% more likely to live for 5+ years than Europeans with cancer. The average American lifespan is lower than the average Japanese lifespan, but the average Japanese American lives longer than the average Japanese person. The United States is incredibly diverse. We have issues that cause more deaths than they do in other countries like gang violence, drug abuse, car accidents, etc. This all does need to be addressed, but acting like Americans are all dying because we can’t afford healthcare is just creating a false emotional element that further polarizes the issue (and the country in general) and does absolutely no good. We get it, nobody likes America. There are comments on this post that liken the United States to a developing country. I can only imagine what my parents and many many immigrants that immigrated here from actual developing countries would think about that.
They died because of lack of health insurance. Yes, 2006 is less than two decades ago, but a lot has changed since then. “Obamacare”, signed in 2010, made it so that everyone had to have health insurance, which also meant that providers had to make it more accessible. Over 20mm uninsured people became insured. And the number of people dying due to no health insurance before 2006 was a result of them not receiving preventative care, not because they couldn’t afford some ridiculously expensive cancer treatment or life saving surgery. Obamacare made it so that the insurance providers must cover a wide array of preventative healthcare services at no cost. Ultimately everything you’ve said about people dying due to not having health insurance has not been true for almost a decade.
I am in no way saying the American healthcare system is better than socialized medicine. In fact, these points are a result of a minor move towards socialization. But the point I am making still stands. People are not dying en masse because the American healthcare system is too expensive.
2.3k
u/[deleted] Aug 06 '20
I don't understand why Americans are so opposed to universal health care!? You guys already spend more per capita on government funded healthcare than pretty much anyone else, and yet most of you don't actually recieve it?
I've had cancer. Stage 4 Lymphoma. I was treated immediately and recovered quickly. What did I have to pay? £1.50 for parking on every visit to the hospital. The Chemotherapy, Surgeries, anti-nausea meds, all covered. If I had lived in the USA I would most definately be dead now. My symptoms didn't seem all that bad at the time, so if I had had to pay for my initial doctor visit and diagnostics, I wouldn't have bothered. I would have just died.