This is the challenge with large mortgages and heath care requirements taking away people's moral agency. Maybe that's the idea.
As usual, this seems to be partisan politics at work. Though I don't really understand why the right portrays universal healthcare as socialism when it's so clearly more "free".
What the right really does in the US is protect massive wealth transfers from tax payers to corporations by restricting Medicare and Medicaid in ways that makes it impossible to make them cost effective.
It seems the default assumption is that the US government could never run something efficiently, but this is said in the same breath as claiming the US as the greatest country on earth. One of those things must therefore not be true. For a country with the resources and know-how of the USA to not be able to run a health service is not in doubt, what is in doubt is whether bad actors will deliberately underfund it and try to point to it as being badly run as a result.
Americans pay twice: Once over the tax bill for a system that aims to provide some coverage, and then again for private insurance.
If the US regulated healthcare properly, they could extend Medicare and Medicaid to most of the population without increasing taxes as a starting point.
Part of the problem is absolutely ludicrous limitations such as actively restricting Medicare from using its market power to negotiate drug prices the way the NHS does, for example.
It's massive corporate welfare.
EDIT: Here's a factcheck on a claim relating to prohibition for government to negotiate for a small part of Medicare as an illustration of the kind of messed up policies that drive up these costs: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/jan/17/tammy-bald...
Easy to give an (incorrect) answer if you have an entire propaganda arm willing to support you.
at least in principle, I am convinced by the argument that single-payer healthcare is cheaper on average. I do have my doubts that partisan politics in the US would actually realize that potential for efficiency, given the usual sabotage of public services in this country. I also doubt that my income bracket would end up saving much even in an optimal implementation.
so at the end of the day, I don't oppose some sort of national healthcare, but I don't really see any personal incentive to rock the boat. possible outcomes for me range from "about the same" to "a lot worse".
But there would be no premiums.
This answers southphillyman’s question about why people like their employer health plans. Because they don’t want to help pay for other people’s healthcare, especially the sicker population that isn’t condoned off into white collar employer health plans.
The tax advantage is also a handout to big businesses, that people who are lucky enough to be employed by them get to enjoy and support, at the expense of the rest of the country.
So summary of US healthcare political situation is everyone is all talk, but when it comes time to vote, nobody wants to pay more in taxes in case someone else gets to benefit more from it than they do.
I'm not sure you understand the peace of mind that comes from being able to go to hospital or use other healthcare facilities without even having to think about the cost, because there won't be one.
I'm not arguing against national insurance, just trying to explain that the personal incentive isn't really there for a lot of professionals. I wouldn't vote against a candidate just because this was part of their platform, but it also isn't enough to make me overlook parts of their platform that I actually oppose.
What's strangest to me is seeing how many of the Americans whom I'd expect to benefit from single-payer health insurance seem to be the ones most wary of it and who argue most loudly against it.
Bought a house cash last year in an extremely low col area and honestly I think I might be _too_ uppity now. Find myself commenting how sad it is that people more senior than myself work on weekends (for the usual meaningless bs reasons). The freedom from having a roof over your head that is security for no loan, and affordable health insurance (about 200 eur a month for a family of 4), is amazing.
This was a at a medium size traditional corp along the metro-north line of coast of Connecticut. By all accounts and my own experience was a pretty good place to work, with minimal (but some) scum baggery, good but not FAANG level salaries and excellent healthcare benefits.
One might be disappointed how effective this technqiue can be.
Now imagine you have car payments, a mortgage, and a family to feed.
More than likely, if you can afford another lawyer, you'll find one.
I drove my upset and blindsided friend to her first meeting with her new divorce attorney after her husband left her. We were early so were sitting outside the Palo Alto firm in the parking lot when a pearl-white Mercedes Maybach rolls in with R&B music bumping and custom plates "MKHMPAY"
She seemed like a very good attorney, but my friend ended up going with another firm because that lady was too expensive ($1500/hr). Even the paralegal there was $500/hr.
Ultimately, my friend told me her divorce was 2x as expensive as her wedding.
One wonders what this characterization is meant to imply.
He charged a healthy but not exorbitant amount for his legal services, and made no secret of the fact that he liked to go for a hike during his lunch hour and return to his exurban house on a few acres to do a bit of gardening and animal care after work each day.
Dude was calm, professional, and utterly ruthless about protecting our business interests while not putting on any pretense of being a slick trial lawyer.
Law is not inherently a "flash" field any more than sales is, unless you actually spend all day every day in a courtroom before a judge.
My employer and co-workers also all see me driving to/from work everyday, so they know when I get a new car.
When most people cannot afford to express morals, you have a host of hungry attack dogs. Some of them start to rationalize that having morals is wrong, that caring about people is wrong because, after all, they can't afford it, so the government can't either.
And if there weren't people desperate for careers and education, the military wouldn't get enough volunteers. So it's very convenient to that whole system.
Propagating the myth of houses as an appropriate working-class investment also sustains this. Index funds are far more liquid, far more diverse, and don't require debt or even a large amount of cash to start with, but a large mortgage is a tight leash.
It literally is. The post-war housing boom was meant to discourage activism by having workers tied to something they could lose.
Hearing all this, and hearing that homosexuality used to be tolerated, it's scary to wonder how much of the status quo is not just _a_ social construct, but purposely constructed for someone's benefit, and recently. And we're expected to presume that it's natural, or at least old, and therefore correct.
Love the [citation needed] and lack of clarity in that second paragraph.