Universal Health Care
Sep. 12th, 2011 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plutherusInsurance is, inherently, unfair. That's why it works. Some people will end up putting more into the pool than they'll ever get out of it. Some people will end up drawing far more than they ever put in. Payments in are based not on what you personally expect to use but on what insurance agency expects over all to have to pay out. All insurance is group (or as some like to refer to it "collectivist") based. It averages out to pay out slightly less than it takes in. But it's not an equal amount to each person in it. The larger the group, the more the law of averages comes into play, and thus the lower overall cost to each member of the group. An entire country is a very large group. That's part of the reason why every single time universal health care has ever been implemented - which is every single industrialized nation other than the US, and a good deal of the third world to boot - it ends up costing far less per capita for more complete coverage and a better standard of care. Look at the numbers - there's a reason why the US pays the highest per capita in health care, but has just about the lowest per capita coverage, one of the lowest life expectancies, and the highest incidence of health-related bankruptcies of any other nation.
Even taking morality completely out of the equation, and claiming you are not a member of a society and therefore can take from it only what you want and not have to contribute to it at all, the numbers still work out from a purely selfish point of view.
But the Tea Party members ignore the numbers. They ignore the data. They insist that just because it's worked everywhere it's been tried (which includes parts of the US), there's no way it could possibly work in the US.
They've never given an answer for why not, but their ideology insists that it can't, therefore all of the data must be wrong. The numbers can't be looked at too closely, and instead they substitute various anecdotes. If my Aunt Mabel's friend's sister's ex-husband had a bad experience in Canada that means more to them when setting policy than the data does. Ideology trumps science.
But what it means in practice is they are willing to actually pay *more* money than they otherwise would in order to prevent people who they don't feel deserve from getting decent health care. It's the philosophy of the child complaining about having to sweep the floor even though he wasn't the only one that made the mess.
Even taking morality completely out of the equation, and claiming you are not a member of a society and therefore can take from it only what you want and not have to contribute to it at all, the numbers still work out from a purely selfish point of view.
But the Tea Party members ignore the numbers. They ignore the data. They insist that just because it's worked everywhere it's been tried (which includes parts of the US), there's no way it could possibly work in the US.
They've never given an answer for why not, but their ideology insists that it can't, therefore all of the data must be wrong. The numbers can't be looked at too closely, and instead they substitute various anecdotes. If my Aunt Mabel's friend's sister's ex-husband had a bad experience in Canada that means more to them when setting policy than the data does. Ideology trumps science.
But what it means in practice is they are willing to actually pay *more* money than they otherwise would in order to prevent people who they don't feel deserve from getting decent health care. It's the philosophy of the child complaining about having to sweep the floor even though he wasn't the only one that made the mess.
