It's not live or die in America, in the worst possible scenario you may go into a deep debt, but they won't kick you to the curb if you're dying.
According to a 2009 study, 45000 people die annually due to lack of health insurance in the US[1]. Due to the ACA there are now more people who are insured but it's still a massive segment of the US population (not to mention that healthcare plans have been covering less and less over time).
The number of people who die due to lack of healthcare is ZERO for countries that have universal healthcare.
Fourty. Five. Thousand. Every. Year.
[1]: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...
The design of any health care system needs to acknowledge the fact that people are going to get sick and die even with an unlimited budget, and there is not an unlimited budget.
We can't all get billionaire treatment for our ailments, no matter what system we have in place. We should be adults and accept that
Obviously people will still get sick and die, that's unfortunately part of the human condition. But I reject the argument that life-saving treatments being impossible to afford by ordinary people is something we should accept.
It's just that in this whole debate it seems we never have the honest discussion about how to deploy limited resources - i.e. how to ration care under a socialized system, or how to subsidize care under a free market system.
I believe that if we discussed it from this perspective perhaps the two sides of this debate could find some common ground.
It's curious that nobody ever complains about limited resources when discussing increasing the military budget or "corporate welfare" through tax breaks and bank bail-outs. It leads me to wonder whether it's actually a significant problem in the first place or if it's just another talking point (there is quite a bit of evidence that deficit-spending is not necessarily a bad thing in-of-itself, what matters is what that money is being spent on).
And if we're looking at that, you have to look at the other side of the coin. Socialized healthcare systems have much larger wait times and you can find deaths attributed to those, so it's disingenuous to say ZERO people died in countries that have universal healthcare.
More research needs to be done before enforcing such a system on a wide scale in America. There has been data suggesting deaths and suffering related from long wait times in Canada. Then you have the increase of Canadians coming to America to escape the wait times. As well what we've seen with VA and ObamaCare wait times.
> 25,456 and 63,090 Canadian women may have died as a result of increased wait times between 1993 and 2009
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/bacchus-barua-/wait-times-cana...
Basically you trade the fear of going into debt and not getting healthcare vs wanting to get healthcare and not being allowed to for an arbitrary amount of time. There are more pros and cons to each system, but my point is that socialized healthcare systems has it's fault and certainly does cause deaths in some instances.
> 19.8 weeks between referral from a general practitioner and receipt of treatment
> across the 10 provinces, the total number of procedures for which people are waiting in 2018 is 1,082,541
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wa...
That's because in the US, a very large proportion of people go to the ER instead of the normal in-patient process that universal healthcare countries use for non-emergency problems. US hospitals have very long waiting times for ER for this reason. Here in Australia, I've needed to go to the ER before and there wasn't a waiting time (though obviously this depends on the time of day and what hospital you go to).
This is all due to lack of funding and staffing for hospitals, not for any other reason.
> More research needs to be done before enforcing such a system on a wide scale in America.
I'm pretty sure the existence of this system across the developed world is sufficient research to show that it works. Even with these worries you have, the healthcare system would be orders of magnitude better than what you have now.