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seawaspOne of the common, and deliberately selective, critiques of aspects of the government that are primarily focused on helping people is that they are expensive; the Post Office, for instance, is often kicked at for "losing money".
Similarly, Medicare-For-All or similar universal healthcare concepts are derided as just people wanting "free stuff" and doing so on "other people's money".
Both of these also have superficially similar, commercial equivalents that these people will tout as superior -- that "private enterprise" and "competition" will naturally lead to better, cheaper outcomes.
These arguments rely upon the naïve and simplified perception of the situations. By presenting the Postal Service's budget in a particular way, it certainly does look like a money sink, and since we have profitable businesses like UPS and FedEx that are, superficially, just like the USPS, clearly there's something wrong with the Postal Service. The arguments against universal healthcare usually rely on one of three general supporting pillars of misleading and naïve perception: painting universal healthcare as demanding people work for nothing, arguing that implementing it would be ruinously costly, and arguing that it's unfair for other people to be paying for your "free" healthcare.
All of these are weaponized naïveté, deliberate and misleading uses of the normal human limitations of understanding of situations that are not in their main focus of understanding.
As I've stated before, the purpose of a government is the support of its citizens -- the maintenance of the civilization so that people can prosper with the minimum necessary level of limitations to their choices and actions.
This is based on the proposition that human lives have a default value -- that every human being has some kind of worth separate from whatever specific achievements they may have accomplished, starting from the moment they're born.
The framing of the Postal Service as "losing money" is really like saying you're "throwing money away" when you're paying for your electricity, water, or phone service. You're not: you're paying money to ensure those important services continue to be provided so you can function well.
The Postal Service is a SERVICE. It's there to provide a (Constitutionally mandated) method for official and private communication that is always available and always affordable. Naturally that has a cost.
But that cost is FAR LESS than a privatized version would be -- or to put it another way, the SERVICE obtained from that money is far greater that it would be if privatized. A corporatized, profit-oriented company handed the USPS' mandate would have only two real choices: 1) charge a lot more for every letter delivered, simply because they'd need to add some kind of profit margin on top of the costs of delivery, or 2) drastically reduce services to anyone who wasn't a significant customer. Likely, it would be BOTH -- charge more AND cut services.
The same applies -- in spades -- to healthcare. Unlike the USPS, which is still holding on as a service, barely, healthcare was opened to profit-focused companies back in the Nixon era, so we can now take a look at the results.
And those results are exactly what one would expect. Companies attempting to run healthcare services treat them as income streams. They don't view themselves as being primarily service providers, because they're run from the top to provide profits for stockholders. A properly-run hospital, for instance, SHOULD have a lot of empty, unused beds at almost all times so that emergencies can be properly addressed -- when a bus overturns and forty-seven people are suddenly brought in for treatment, you don't want them spending hours waiting for proper rooms. A properly-set up ER should have plenty of doctors and nurses so that any normal traffic through the ER can be quickly and efficiently dealt with.
That's anathema to a business, of course. Paying for the maintenance of a bunch of empty rooms (that have to be kept clean and ready for patients at any time) is inefficient; the rooms should ALWAYS be in use. There should be no nurses or doctors standing idle for more than a moment or two -- we're paying them, after all.
And for healthcare, another industry built on top of it makes the cost vastly higher, and the service vastly worse: the insurance industry. The original CONCEPT of insurance was to spread the cost of all healthcare among a larger pool of people. The modern version is to attempt to minimize all costs of actual healthcare in order to retain the money paid for the insurance.
Ironic, then, that "universal healthcare" is simply the original concept for insurance writ large; the costs of healthcare spread across the entire nation so that we all are supporting each other. But with a SERVICE focus, and no profit requirement, the cost of that service overall will be far less.
Of course, that means absolutely erasing 99% of the existing health insurance industry, which isn't gonna go without a fight.
To fight, of course, they make more use of weaponized naïveté and misleading framing, by pointing to failures of other universal healthcare services as though these invalidate the concept.
But of course, what is relied on there is that most people have minimal grasp of actual statistics, and a strong preference for any personal experiences, or ones they relate to their personal experience. And when arguing against a change, pointing out any failure of the opposed system gives the impression that this failure is COMMON -- or that ANY failure is unacceptable.
No human service or endeavor is perfect, but those fighting against such changes will use any imperfection as an argument against change -- even though an unbiased look at each side would reveal that the "imperfections" are present in both, and MUST be present because no one, and nothing, is perfect.
The important question with respect to comparing the health services approaches is "how likely is the average person to receive timely, appropriate treatment rather than either less effective or less competent treatment?" -- and those fighting the idea of universal healthcare quite deliberately SEPARATE OUT the key element that reveals the true answer:
How many people choose to AVOID treatment, or delay it until the outcome is, of necessity, worse. In the USA, anyone who isn't quite well-off is ALWAYS going to be weighing the cost of a medical visit, ranging from just talking to the doctor to getting a required surgery. The proper cost that SHOULD be weighed is, "will this likely help me live a better life?", but here in the USA, the question is "can I even manage to pay back the cost of this visit?"
That, alone, shows that our current version of "health insurance" has failed in its execution; the whole point of insurance was to make medical support affordable, but instead it has become a tool to reduce use of healthcare services because the average person can't afford it.
In essence, we've doubled the cost of healthcare and reduced its safety and effectiveness because we've been convinced that "other people's money" is somehow better off in the hands of an insurance company than the hands of a government service provider, BOTH of which are run by fallible people who will undoubtedly sometimes screw up, deliberately or accidentally, and that it's somehow better if it's a private company with less accountability to anyone except the stockholders.
The "demand for perfection -- but only on one side" approach is, in fact, a major tactic and stumbling block in modern politics, and I should probably make that another post.
