Why are rightists so vehemently opposed to Universal single payer health care?

Why are rightists so vehemently opposed to Universal single payer health care?

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FREE MARKET IS FREEDOM

FREEEEEEEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM

MUH FREE MARKET, user

Seriously though, from what I can gather, they oppose it because an NHS type system would stand in the way of private healthcare.

In America it's impossible because of niggers ok

Because the invisible hand of the free market is the best and most efficient way to get people what they want, and forcing everyone to get on government healthcare would would starve out hard working private insurance that can do the job better and force everyone to rely on inefficient hospitals where you wait five months for a bottle of aspirin like in Canada (where this happens because the state is naturally inefficient unlike the free market, and not because of neoliberal reforms taking all the funding away). Also they're going to make death panels where they'll put grandma to death because big government makes you a cog in the machine and they don't care about your individual rights, just inefficiency. Basically, if healthcare was totally unregulated and the state didn't exist, everyone would have affordable high quality care. It's only the state interfering in the market that stops that from happening, honest. Ignore what happens with unregulated private hospitals in China, that's crony capitalism and they're communists anyway.

I'm not sure universal health care is explicitly socialist. It just seems to me like a hack to keep capitalism less unjust. It creates this problem of, should we let people do what they want with their health? Should we have to pay for the consequences? Being a nanny state and banning drugs or whatever seems unjust to dissidents, but dedicating services to deal with health effects of poor lifestyle choices seems unfair to those who do not follow those lifestyles. Plus you get into quagmires like spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep some 92 year old guy alive when he's going to die in a couple years.

I believe in a socialist society, when people are paid the full value of their labor, drug patents and private drug research and drug company price gouging is abolished, and healthcare is performed for use, not for profit, eliminating exploitative "pay us $100,000 or die" scenarios, healthcare will become affordable and people will become able to pay for healthcare with their own labor credits, and be able to make their own decisions about the health effects of their lifestyle choices.

The problem with banning drugs is that it's less effective from a harm reduction perspective. Pure heroin, for example, is safer than alcohol when properly administered, and a disproportionate amount of the harm comes from dangers related to adulteration and dirty needles. Plus, I don't buy that a majority of healthcare funding goes to treating problems directly caused by anything amounting to a choice. That sounds like a rightist smear to me - do you have any data?

Lots of the health problems we see today are caused directly by material circumstances related to capitalism. Excessively sedentary lifestyles, poor quality foods, etc. I don't think reformism is the way to go or that people should support any government with a reformist platform, but I don't think single-payer healthcare would be any sort of problem during transitional socialism.

"Choices" are basically the #1 cause of death in first world countries through heart disease and cancer; smoking, eating tons of sugar, refusing to exercise.

No

Right "choices" because when you set people up to fail, they WILL fail.
Raise standards of living and people "choose" not to take drugs.

I'm not, but explain to me how someone who works excessive hours sitting on their ass or relies excessively on the cheapest, calorie-rich and nutrient-poor food is supposed to follow your advice? Even people involved in physical labour seldom have it any better since repetitive, monotonous strain doesn't do you any good.

You can't deny the impact of advertising in all this, either, and the fact that food manufacturers using an over-abundance of salt and sugar has to do directly with moving units and making a profit. This bersonal resbonsibilidies :DD stuff is something that food industry think tanks just love to push.

Wew

No, because personal responsibility convinces people to eat less, and the food industry does not like that.

Even the capitalist "solutions" are a joke.
Here buy this movement tracker which connects to your phone, and sends us all your data.
Never mind that walking alone doesn't even count as exercise, and that the data gathered is fucking useless. That will be $149

Sure you're a leftist?

Wew

I think how capitalism has led to the epidemic of obesity we're experiencing right now is a pretty good example of commodity fetishism.

You don't actually kniw what commodity fetishism is, do you?

Yes, you child, when you barely have time to wash and sleep it's kind of difficult to engage in exercise. What little free time people have they tend to prefer to spend with their kids or what have you. Hell, plenty of people don't even have time to cook.

The personal responsibility stuff is how corporations minimize their own hand in this by pushing off responsibility directly onto consumers. That meme that people like to push about
is based on a study funded by a food industry think tank, meant to spread a meme that diet is unimportant so as to not hurt sales. Even then, the rhetoric of personal responsibility is again used to deflect blame from food manufacturers, saying that they're not the ones at fault for making shitty food and they shouldn't be prevented from doing so, because it's ultimately the consumer's decision.

Hey righty, have you ever read The Road to Wigan Pier?

Although the miners could technically afford good food, they tended to choose stodgy crap to enrich their bleak lives, leading to malnutrition and disease.

When the choice isn't real, personal responsibility is a spook.

Replacement of social relationships with economic ones

1. The average work week in the US is 47 hours. While shitty, this is not anywhere near "barely have time to wash" territory.
2. Even if you worked less, you are still faced with the choice of exercising or doing something else with your time.
3. The fact that capitalism makes people miserable is not an argument for why I should share responsibility in other people's lifestyle choices in a socialist economy.

Are you just going to make up shit if you can't address my post? I said personal responsibility causes people to eat LESS.


Hey, liberal.

Good for them. How about paying them more so they can live happy lives instead of paying them shit but offering tons of medical service?


Explain how that was relevant to my post.

because my hard earned tax dollars are being wasted on bums

Because then unhappiness comes from living in a class stratified society, rather than not having 30% more money to buy more crap.

(I've bought enough shit in my life, to know that buying any amount of shit won't make me happy. Hence lefty politics)

Which part of my post were you responding to?

The bit where you said "just pay them niggers more"

I missed the part where I called someone niggers.
I also missed the part where I called socialism "class stratified".
I also missed the part where I said people would use the extra money to buy "crap".

1. You're not taking into account reproductive labour and commuting time.
2. Yes, and in that case you could make the case that it's their own fault, but even then we would be better served by encouraging them to exercise and eat well through whatever means we have.
3. I'm not talking about having single-payer anything in socialism, I'm talking about in a state transitioning to socialism, in which case single payer is still the best way to allow vast numbers of people to have access to essential health care. Talking about how so and so operates under socialism is pointless until we are living under socialism.

I am saying that the rhetoric of personal responsibility is being used by corporations to push messages amenable to their needs. In this case, that you can enjoy sugary nothing calories and still be healthy if you take personal responsibility and exercise to burn off the calories, or if you responsibly choose our special tasty organic line of products or so on. It's not even a matter of people eating too much, it's about them eating the wrong kind of food, the kind that our hunter-gatherer brains crave the most and thus the kind that is most profitable and proliferated in the markets. You say bersonal resbonsibilidies but if people have no idea what their responsibilities are all they are left with in the end is the idea that they themselves are to blame for their state of affairs. And everyone tells a different story, about what your personal responsibility is, whether to buy this or buy that or subscribe to this self-improvement philosophy or that one.

Personal responsibility is used to alienate, to push the fable of the homo economicus by representing the individual as entirely self-concerned and self-sufficient. Personal responsibility is the mantra of neoliberal governmentality, as it's used to attack public institutions in the guise of giving power to the individual. Welfare is supplanted by charity, social work and healthcare by volunteering, crime control by keeping an eye out and being responsible.

Knowingly or not, you're spouting neoliberal catchphrases here. Yes, people should know that good diets and exercise are important and we can be justified in expecting them to have a modicum of interest in their own health. This, however, does not mean that we should minimize structural factors that lead to their conditions or ignore the impediments that keep them from behaving ideally and so on.

Even then, if we did reach socialism, worrying about your money going to treat people with smack problems would be absurd. Single-payer health care wouldn't even make a dint in your income. Personal responsibility exists only to make the short-sighted upset at taxes.

Fine, though every social program in capitalism is a subsidy to business so they can exploit harder.

Figuring out how the society works is necessary before we can live in it.

I get that, but it's not relevant to my point. I'm not responding to the rest because marketers and right-wingers lying to people is also irrelevant to my point.

Ftfy

cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/blog/pharmacare-sweden-style-1.3247068

...

You too

Single payer isn't the way to go. What we need is to dump insurance entirely and move to nationalized health care.

When private property does not exist or is being phased out, this is irrelevant.

Right, and we have no idea how socialist society works because it has never existed at a large scale. All we have to work off of are observations of capitalist society. Figuring out how it works will involve observing how it works. Then, any policy we implement will be based on the actual state of things in society, including what the problems are and what its needs are.

The cost is spread around. As a proportion of your income it would be nothing. Even so, it depends on what sort of socialism you're talking about. You do realize how absurd your worry is if healthcare is being produced for use, right?

Why do you keep vacillating between talking about actual socialism and some sort of transitory reformist state?

That's what economic theories are for.

From who to who? Everyone who doesn't die suddenly inevitably experiences expensive health problems. It may not be a huge proportion of your total life income but that would be no different than if you saved.

For use by those with the requisite labor credits.

I'm talking in the context of a transitory state in the process of abolishing private property. You are insisting that single payer is not needed under socialism. I'm sure you can infer the context of each given statement.

Economic theories are based on observations as well. We do not have any observations of socialist economy, any theory you bring around will have to be evaluated according to evidence.

A little of everyone's labour goes to maintaining the medical infrastructure and medical personnel.

How would this make the distribution of essential medical services an medicines more efficient?

Conservatives are taught most of their beliefs and acquire the rest on that foundation

Follow that line of reasoning down through other areas such as food, housing, and transportation and see if it makes sense.

OK, done. Your move.

Do labor credits only concern commodity consumption tough? Is medical care still a commodity under socialism?

It's a combination of commodities and services.

Because they believe in the "personal responsibility" spook.

Historically "health care" has always been a private profession. Every person has different needs and shouldn't base all of his or her decisions on societal expectations (i.e. if you don't use the public "health care" system you are stupid and deserve a slow, agonizing death).

The phrase "health care" is marketing.

"Universal single payer health care" is nothing more than guaranteed receivables for Big Pharma.

Only lolbergtarians are.

kys tbh fam

To do what?

Oh! So universal health care cannot work with capitalism!

Hmmm…

Also "historically".

KEK! What is ancient Greece and the Hippocratic Oath?

Wat

The "little people" of the right follow their leaders.
The politicos like being able to funnel public money into their "friends".