Tweet is from around February 2022; I’m not visiting that cesspool to find the exact date.

  • UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee
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    13 hours ago

    Insurance premiums are flat. They don’t give a shit about your income. The insurance premium for a minimum wage worker and a billionaire would be the same for a given coverage.

    When you make it universal and single payer, the billionaire has to pay more money for the same quality of healthcare compared to the minimum wage worker. Therefore, the billionaire is essentially subsidizing the minimum wage worker’s healthcare.

    Now of course, you can argue about the ethics of private property, how the billionaire became a billionaire by wage theft and so on. The point is, within the capitalist system that we have, universal healthcare is still the rich person paying for the poor person’s healthcare. This is the technicality that I’m talking about.

    Remember, I support universal single payer healthcare. I am merely talking about technicality here.

    To address the emergency room situation, what happens when the person being admitted lacks any sort of insurance? If they can’t cough up money, then they go into debt. Their credit scores get screwed. Life becomes hell.

    • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      The minimum wage worker simply doesn’t have the same quality insurance. They could never afford the best plans, as those are more than they can pay, so they get more limited plans with less coverage, fewer options, and longer wait times. You often need to pay out of pocket to get acceptable care for certain issues, even if you have decent insurance.

      With the emergency room issue, most of that debt the uninsured people take on never gets paid by them. This isn’t just their problem, but a problem for hospitals and doctors and banks who don’t get paid for their work. The banks don’t just shrug their shoulders and accept the systemic loss, but recoup the costs from the entire medical industry. It costs more than 2x for a bandage here because those banks make the cost of providing care higher at every possible step.

      As more become uninsured or unable to pay, even the hospitals can’t stay out of the red, shuttering care for millions. Many areas have zero options for hundreds of miles as a result, meaning many people die preventable deaths because it takes hours to get it. The US has a geographic scale you cannot comprehend as someone elsewhere. It’s on the scale of the EU. State politics serve country size populations, but the relative homogeneity of culture betrays this fact.

      You have absolutely no idea how a world without single payer works because you assume we have basic shit you take for granted. You once again demonstrate that arguments against single payer MUST IGNORE facts to work, cutting out the bigger picture to keep you from recognizing the scale of the problem. It’s why capitalism is so impossible to tackle in general.

      • UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee
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        2 hours ago

        The minimum wage worker simply doesn’t have the same quality insurance.

        THERE! So the billionaire pays more to get higher quality insurance. In a single payer universal healthcare system, the billionaire and the minimum wage worker both get the same quality of healthcare despite paying different amounts. This is what I mean.

        You have absolutely no idea how a world without single payer works because you assume we have basic shit you take for granted.

        I have experience with the Indian multi payer, non universal healthcare system. It sucks a lot more than the US. U guys at least have the affordable healthcare act, which prohibits discrimination against ppl with pre-existing conditions by insurance companies. Indians don’t even have that. The universal single payer healthcare system that I have experience with is the Canadian one.

        Now, of course the arguments against universal healthcare fall flat on ethical grounds, as you explained above. I am not saying that universal healthcare is bad or whatever. However, that does not change the fact that universal healthcare follows the “from each according to their ability to each according to their need” thing. Rich or poor, everyone gets the same quality of healthcare despite paying different prices. The rich here are subsidizing the poor.

        Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. The concepts of private property themselves cause trouble, where we lose all sight of humanity, blah blah blah. That’s a discussion for another day.

        The point is, if you are rich and want a better life for yourself, you probably should be against universal healthcare. If u r anything but that, and want a better life for everyone- u, ur family, ur friends, or just society in general, universal healthcare is a common sense choice.