I don’t often blog about politics here, but I’ve noticed a lot of people from outside the US not understanding why there’s so much popular opposition to the healthcare reform bill that has been passed, citing that they have universal healthcare in their country, and it’s great, and it’s about time we entered the modern era, and sometimes socialism is good. So, I decided to post my views on it.
IMO, there’s legitimate reasons for not wanting this.
The first thing I have to say is, this isn’t socialism. Socialism is when the government provides the funding for healthcare for everyone. What this is, is government-mandated use of (commercial) health insurance.
We’re still paying the same people, and they’ll now be forced to provide coverage, but it’s still the same system as we’ve had before, essentially. Same corruption, same fighting people every step of the way on service, same systemic flaws that are designed to siphon money out of everyone in the system for insurance companies to profit on treatments instead of cures, or even unnecessary treatments. Almost every complaint that applies to our current system applies to the new system.
Now, there’s legitimate reasons for us to oppose real socialized medicine, too.
Our government has a very long history of failing miserably at its attempts at socialized medicine, Medicare (for the elderly) and Medicaid (for low income patients.) They’re running into massive deficits, with no signs of recovery, and the quality of service isn’t very good (partially due to that.) Of course, Medicaid is being expanded as part of this, with no signs of further income sources for it.
Myself, I’m undecided on it. Socialized medicine has worked for quite a few other countries, and corporate medicine is really quite terrible, but on the flipside, the US’s experiments in socialized medicine have been very, very miserable failures.
That’s all, I just thought I’d write something up to explain that.