The GOP would like us to return to the bad old days of overcrowded emergency rooms for non-emergency healthcare
While the GOP in the US Senate try to find a way to bribe and strong arm enough votes to pass their version of Trumpcare, I had another debate with a conservative friend about the issue. He doesn’t think he should pay for someone else’s healthcare. This is why we are so far apart on the issue. He thinks it’s like buying a car and I think healthcare is a fundamental human right and a basic plan should be provided and funded by the government using tax dollars.
Josh Marshall, over at Talkingpoints Memo puts the divide clear and to the point:
Current Republican ideology, if not all Republicans, posits that it is simply not the responsibility or place of government, certainly not the federal government, to make sure everyone has health care coverage. You can agree or disagree with that premise. But it’s not hard to understand and it is not indefensible. Very few of us think the government should step in if someone doesn’t have enough money to buy a car. We don’t think there’s a right to a home or apartment where every child has their own bedroom. On most things we accept that things are not equal, even if we believe that extremes of inequality are bad for society and even immoral.
But many of us think that healthcare is fundamentally different. It’s not just another market product that we accept people can or can’t get or can or can’t get at certain levels of quality because of wealth, chance, exertion and all the other factors that go into wealth and income. This is both a moral and ideological premise.
One might more sympathetically say that Republicans believe that the market can more reliably and cheaply provide coverage in comparison with the government. But there’s little evidence this is the case with health care coverage – certainly not when it comes to the big picture issues of constructing insurance markets in which some people have dramatically less money and dramatically higher risk. In any case, Republican health care policies since the beginning of this century have shown very little interest in using market mechanisms to expand care. After all, Obamacare is a more progressive and redistributionist implementation of an idea that emerged from Republican think-tanks looking for policy alternatives to a national health care social insurance plan like what we now call “single payer.”
“Why won’t they work together…” just won’t work when the two sides are on different planes of existence traveling toward completely different outcomes.
The GOP wants to keep 22 million folks from being able to afford basic standard healthcare so their rich allies can get a quick trillion dollar tax cut. The Democrats want to fix the blemishes on the ACA so that more people can benefit from one of the greatest social welfare programs since Social Security helped keep Grandma from having to live in a homeless camp in her sunset years.
Someone will need to pay for other people’s healthcare.
The choice is between wild healthcare costs as John and Sue Working Class has to use the ER for basic healthcare or making sure they don’t have to make those tough choices and hopefully it will encourage them to seek help before they get sick.
Trumpcare, and “Repeal & Replace”, is a scam for anyone thinking it is meant to be better than the ACA.
