Summary
A Gallup poll shows 62% of Americans believe the government should ensure universal healthcare coverage—the highest support in over a decade.
While Democratic backing remains strong at 90%, support among Republicans and Independents has also grown since 2020.
Public frustration with the for-profit healthcare system has intensified following the arrest of a suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, reportedly motivated by anger at the industry.
Recent controversies, including Anthem’s rollback of anesthesia coverage cuts, and debates over Medicare privatization highlight ongoing dissatisfaction with the system.
How many of those 62% voted for the guy who wants to let insurance companies deny even harder?
let insurance companies deny even harder
Sooner death for insurance companies
Here’s the thing… having health coverage doesn’t mean jack crap.
I’ve told my story before, it got best of’d on reddit and such, but it bears repeating why we need Universal Health Care:
tl;dr lost my doctors due to an insurance change 4 weeks in to a 6 week open heart surgery recovery…
In 2018, my company was in the process of being sold. No big deal, above my paygrade, nothing for me to worry about.
Then I got sick right after Thanksgiving. Really bad heartburn that lasted 5 days. It wasn’t heartburn. I had a heart attack. 12/3/2018 I had open heart surgery, single bypass, and that started a 6 week recovery clock.
On 1/1/2019, the sale of my company closed and we officially had new owners. I also officially lost all of my doctors because the new employers don’t do Kaiser in Oregon. They do it in WA and CA, but each state has to be negotiated and they never had presence here.
1/2/2019 I start working with Aetna to find doctors, hospitals, etc. Beyond the cardiologist I need a new pharmacist, podiatrist, diabetes care and a general “doctor” doctor.
Fortunately, my new employer is a big enough fish, they have their own concierge at Aetna and she gets me into the Legacy Health system.
On 1/3/2019 I start developing complications, but I don’t know it at the time. It starts with a cough. All the time. Then, when I try to lay down, like to sleep, I’m drowning, literally choking and gagging.
The concierge and I try to get an appointment, we’re told 2-3 months. For a dude still recovering from open heart surgery? Best they could do is 2 weeks. 1/14/2019.
I can’t lay down to sleep so I buy a travel neck pillow and sleep sitting up.
I get to see the new doctor at the “official” end of the 6 week recovery. He doesn’t know me or my history so he wants to run tests.
I’m sitting at home playing video games and waiting on test results when the call comes… Congestive heart failure. Report to the ER immediately.
My heart developed an irregular heart beat, which caused fluid build up in my chest. They admitted me and were getting ready to pull fluid off me.
“What happened to your foot?”
“I dunno, what happened to my foot? I can’t feel my feet.”
Remember when I said I was sitting around playing video games, waiting for test results? Yeah, my foot was touching a radiator and I didn’t know it. 3rd degree burns, first four toes. Pinkie was spared.
So I’m in the hospital a week. I lose 4 liters of water per day. 50 lbs. of water. No wonder I was drowning. Regular bandage changes.
So now I’m facing two procedures. Electrocardio version to fix my heart, skin grafts to fix my toes.
This whole time the new insurance covers 80% until I reach the out of pocket maximum of $6,500. Then it will cover 100%.
The old insurance? ER visit for heart attack, hospital admission, 8 days in the hospital, open heart bypass… $250. $100 for meds and all the oxygen bottles I can carry.
So we hit the out of pocket maximum almost immediately. My wife had a problem with her foot running through the Seattle airport. The doctor who did her toe amputation was decided to be out of network so that was another $1,100.
I was never unemployed through all this. I had enough vacation and sick time banked to cover it. Cobra didn’t apply. Continuity of care didn’t apply because the new hospital DID have a cardiac department. Buying my old insurance wasn’t an option, it was far too expensive without employer backing. Income is too high for assistance (thank god) and I took steps to max out my HSA account, which is good because we drained it twice.
Three 1 week hospital stays (2 for me, 1 for my wife), multiple ER visits, two more major medical procedures… That would be enough to break most people even with good insurance.
So if you read any of that, let me ask you something… Why does the quality of my health care and my quality of life have to depend on who I work for and what insurance companies they choose to work with?
Why does the quality of my health care and my quality of life have to depend on who I work for and what insurance companies they choose to work with?
Because Nixon was in bed with big business, then Ford fumbled the gas crisis, and finally Carter naively trusted Congress to transition from employee mandates to single payer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_health_care_reform_in_the_United_States
Aside from agreeing with you. Question. Why didn’t cobra apply? I would have thought it could. And did you have an option to pay the full cost of coverage out of pocket for any length of time? Not that any of this should matter, just curious in case I, or anyone I know, ends up in the same situation.
. Why didn’t cobra apply?
Because he didn’t leave his company. His company changed their insurance.
I thought it was more about the insurance than the company. :( it should be.
TIL 38% of Americans are CEO’s
38% are the, I never have to go to the doctor. I never get sick. Until one day, they realize what an absolute nightmare the healthcare system is. 38% are probably the percentage that have had use for anything other than doctors visits.
How is it only 62%?! Who actually looks at their medical bill and thinks, “Yep, this is accurate and absolutely worth every penny”? I have health insurance, and I still avoid going to the doctor unless I’m practically dying because I simply can’t afford it.
And yet, I’m stuck paying nearly $10k a year for insurance—just in case something catastrophic happens—only to still face massive copays, out-of-pocket costs, and coverage denials. It’s completely counterintuitive.
The system is broken.
Screw the insurance industry.
Screw the state of medical care in the U.S.Healthcare shouldn’t be a privilege—it’s a human right. Normalize that.
Sounds like 62% of Americans should have voted for the candidate that might have actually made that possible.
Bernie Sanders tried but did not get enough votes when he ran for president because the government paying for your healthcare is apparently bad for some reason.
Its bad for profits. And since the government is run by people with a vested interest in profits, it wont change anytime soon. All the oligarchs have to do is convince enough rubes that universal healthcare is bad, and it will never see the light of day.
Might is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence.
Its important to make incremental progress. Kamala was a standard dem like Joe. Still they are open to hearing good ideas; compared to Trump.
Candidates*
Real change will come from house and senate.
Not “coverage”, “affordable coverage”. I don’t want coverage through whatever capitalist exploit insurance company. I want affordable healthcare without lifesucking middlemen
The coverage the fire department provides is affordable. And my Library. And my streets. And the storm water system. And K-12.
Yet, they keep voting for the opposite. People seem too dumb to be allowed good things.
Remember Biden beat Medicare. Democrats have never been serious about universal healthcare. Your choices in the US are “lip service” or “burn everything down”
American voters have been indoctrinated to think anything that in government initiated is “socialism.”
100% and the sad fact is it plays into the GOP/ Oligarchs hand.
Messaging is important. Just look at the damage control corporate media is spewing out about UHC shooting.
It’s good that the majority support it, but it’s also concerning that 38% didn’t. The USA should have universal healthcare. I don’t want to say where I live or where I don’t live but if you live in a country which doesn’t have universal healthcare I genuinely feel bad for you.
It’s because they don’t understand how the system works. Most people I know who are against it always go straight to “how could we pay for it”. Not understanding that countries that do it work directly with the manufacturers of the medicine and hospitals so they get much better rates. 2022 showed 6500 per person for full coverage in Canada. 12,500 per person in the U.S… with no coverage for the most part.
We know some Republican candidates know this as well, which is why Desantis promised lower health care costs in Florida by cutting a deal with Canada to import their lower cost drugs by trying to skirt buying them from the companies the are giving tax breaks to and not addressing.
Years later… No drugs have been shipped from Canada and no deals were settled because Canada doesn’t want to ship their drugs to Florida and have shortages.
Much like an insurance company can say, I’m only going to pay $150 for that MRI instead of the $1,600 quoted, the government can do the same, and instead of lining the pockets of middlemen, it comes back as savings to the people. In general I believe I saw if we implemented a plan like Canadas, the average American would save 20% on their income taxes, and have full coverage. Meaning no longer having co-pays, deductibles, out of network doctors, etc. etc.
To me it just says, if you want further specialists outside of the ones provided, you can pay for them just like you do now. And the government could pitch in only the cost that they would pay towards a standard patient procedure.
“Medicare for all” became a slogan because it’s insanely more efficient than private healthcare. And we’ll pay for it with taxes, the same way we pay for anything. But if your taxes do go up, it will be by less than you were paying previously, so people are still saving money. They can only use the most reductive and cliche arguments because the evidence is all against them. A public health plan would be cheaper and provide more care.
Then vote like you’re not fucking idiots.
Again, there’s that 30-40% Party Of No crowd that is likely the same starve the beast pro-Trump voters we’ve seen in polls time and again. The ones probably going to need those very same services, if they already aren’t using medicare/-aid.
That is why universal healthcare risk pools need to start at the state level. The goal needs to be to lock out the subsidization of those who are voting for predatory policies. This accomplishes a few important things.
-
It will systemically punish Republican voters in Republican led states.
-
Over time it will (in theory) massively shift the public consciousness in those areas around how badly they are getting fucked.
-
It removes the necessity of reliance on a federal change in order to begin the process of legislative reform.
This is obviously not a perfect solution, but I don’t see this happening in any other way. There is roughly a (0%) chance we see universal healthcare implemented at the national level first.
There are very few states that can handle the cost of state-funded health care, and unfortunately they would be faced with negotiating care from for-profit enterprises that have no care other than maximizing profits.
It needs to be a “from the ground up” service, which we had at one point - we used to have a lot of state, municipal and county hospitals, but the majority of them got shuttered and replaced with for-profit enterprises - where the state creates facilities owned/operated by the state and can control pricing with no expectation for a profit to be made. That’s how you get care for all at government prices, we can’t keep shoveling money at for-profit businesses.
This is an interesting idea, but I don’t see where that is ever going to be effective either given the massive logistical undertaking that would be required in order to deal with states managing non-profit medical facilities. The only option is to somehow circumvent the middle men.
Circumventing the middle man is exactly why for-profit enterprises resist state care with everything they have. The government is a powerful negotiator that can undercut for-profit business because they don’t need to profit from the work being done.
Yes, but you could say the exact same thing about the creation of single payer state insurance pools could you not? They can force negotiations on medical providers at the state level, and force them to accept state backed insurance if they wish to conduct business in that state. That seems like a way simpler solution than needing to come up with massive amounts of logistical infrastructure that already exists.
Not as effective as the government as a whole. Also singles that state put among others as you said, placing additional adversity between the state and existing or potential employers.
Look, if it were simple, we could do it. Even if much of the difficulty is artificially created by businesses and other monied interests, it still exists and one state doesn’t exist in a vacuum where businesses wouldn’t have the option to leave. Other states would undermine the attempt for political or financial gain. It’s not simple.
I totally agree that no solution is going to be simple. I think what I envisioned was an inter-state compact where it would make it essentially impossible for medical providers to pull away. If we just use the West Coast as an example, what if Washington, Oregon, and California were to create a public option risk pool that could then be joined by other blue states? That is really the idea that I think is the most sensible, and potentially feasible to implement over time.
-
38% probably on Medicare/Medicaid
lol was gonna say the same based on this headline
The midterm campaign should literally just be, “Death to Health Insurance, Public Health Now”.
No other issues. Campaign on that as a mandate. If we can only change one big thing at a time then we should only promise one big thing.
Historically we can change zero big things at a time. But I agree with you. Our rate of change has got to change. (Mathematics/physics joke goes here.)
Some of Tim Walz’s largest donors are health insurance and professionals. They have financial incentives to keep the status quo. With Democrats like this, who needs Republicans?
Walz doesn’t have a seat anymore. And what do the Democrats have to lose by actually moving left?
I’d say the reason the Democrats won’t move left is because the party elite have a lot of donors they’d piss off by actually supporting serious leftist economic policy.
Maybe I’m wrong. Hell, I’d love to be wrong. But I’ve sort of lost hope that the democratic party is ever going to deliver.
Yeah I get that. But it would be the kind of move that shakes up losing all of the swing states, the popular vote, and both legislative bodies. Political parties want to get elected and “normal” campaigning isn’t doing it anymore. A few more losses like this and there won’t be a democratic party.
Why even complain? We all know Dems will vote blue no matter who next cycle
Well tbf the reason I’m complaining is that the status quo sucks and isn’t going to get better, even if the Dems sweep next election.
That’s nearly 2/3 of Americans, a pretty strong majority. Those other 38% of Americans can go fuck themselves, right along with the corporate oligarchs they worship.
Shame that Americans are stupid and voted in racists, fascist, classist grifters that believe healthcare is only for the ultra wealthy and will make sure the next United Healthcare CEO can deny now medical coverage.
Too late with the Orange Man in the White House…
Why though, many of them voted for Trump, next month antivax RFK Jr. will be health minister. Trump has claimed a healthcare plan will be ready “next week” for the past 8 years. People wanted Obamacare gone. So what do you want? Healthcare or no healthcare?
They want obamacare gone, but they like their affordable care act.
