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Comment by juiceland | Hacker News Reader

Universal healthcare doesn’t happen in the US because a certain subset of the American population would rather have worse health outcomes than guarantee abortions, HIV prevention, and gender-affirming care.

Also, ~150M people with employer coverage plus seniors on Medicare fear disruption more than they value expansion.

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There's also a racist element (I know that's a politically incorrect word here, but such things happen). People don't want to fund services to the lazy ______s - fill in one or more of many groups toward whom hate is promoted.

When a similar bill was voted down years ago, someone I was with laughed and said, 'no way were we paying for healthcare for the Blacks'. It fits the divide and conquer strategy to divide poorer people with hate so that they don't unite and vote for all these things - why do you think leaders promote hate?

Another way of looking at is that some people are concerned about what happens to limited "free" healthcare resources when you simultaneously oppose any controls on immigration.

Can you name any politician or leader, of any signficance, who opposes "any controls on immigration"?

Yes. Jonathan Metzl wrote a book about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness

You can easily drop those from a universal healthcare system - look at the NHS and gender affirming care across the pond. So it can't only be that part - I think it's wanting the undeserving to not have healthcare.

It’s not that easy. You have to make it through the primaries to stand for election. Both parties are increasingly dominated by their outside wings. If you said “I’ll try to get universal healthcare done and I’ll build the coalition needed for it, even if it means accepting painful compromises like not covering gender affirming care” you won’t make it out of the democratic primaries. That’s why there’s so many common sense positions that have majority support yet never a majority in political bodies.

What I mean is that if the conservatives only objection to universal healthcare was these things, they could just leave them out. There's no requirement that a single payer system cover all procedures.

Ergo the reason they didn't support the ACA and won't do this is something other than it covering hormones and abortion.

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