Just to out myself here at the start, I am what one might call a “Bernie Bro” if that tracks, I am all for a healthcare system that takes care of my fellow citizens.
No matter how much I prop up my disdain for humanity I somehow find myself caring. I am horrified by the thought of people dying from easily treated illness and injury simply because we have a system that doesn’t care whether they live or die.
That being said, I understand the impracticability of such an idea, it’s idealism in its rawest form. There’s no reasonable way to pay for something of that scale, at least not with our current economic position, blame who you wish, it’s an issue we all have to deal with.
I get the economical argument, the only feasible way to fund a healthcare system that covers every one of us measly peasants is an astronomical tax, which no one wants, or to cut back the production of new medicine.
There’s some thought to be made about integrating hospital function into the government, and there are a lot of places where we can cut back the administrative costs of Hospitals; but in order to accomplish this, we’d have to also cut back safety lines and red tape that saves lives from experimental drugs.
There could also be an accountability loss, if we get too lax with medical institutions then we have to worry about them getting away with killing patients. A scary number of people, scary being more than one, die from allergic reactions to medicine and even more so, anesthetics.
Whoo! Now that we got that out of the way, just take a quick breather. Still with me? Okay good. Now I’m going to brow beat and shame you for not wanting to help other people you sick monster. For legal reasons, that was a joke.
Let’s talk about humanitarianism, big word, with big meaning. For today we’ll shorten it to its key principle, treating every human being as that: A human being, with rights and liberties.
There’s been a lot of work from humanitarians over the years, there’s even an entire board in the United Nations dedicated to human rights. Just for being born you have 30! Now isn’t that just nifty. A couple of those include the right to life, liberty, and to not be tortured. I don’t know how you feel about being left in the street dying slowly from injuries, but I think you could call that a form of torture.
And just a quick tangent, to the people, namely christians and other religious types, who call themselves pro-life. Those that are in camp against legal, medical abortion, that don’t support the idea of a healthcare system that takes care of everyone regardless of the amount of cash in their pocket, how do you reconcile? That you think that every person deserves a shot at life, but once they’re out of the womb, you would watch them die on the streets without batting an eye.
Universal Healthcare is, for some reason, rather controversial and I don’t think I really need to tell you that. There are plenty of pros and cons, more than enough to debate, really it just sucks.
You’d think that it could be this simple conversation, “do you think that everyone should have easy access to medicine without losing everything they own?” No, Instead it ends up being this noisy, painful argument over whether or not it’s economically profitable to care about the well-being of your fellow humans. I say that it sucks, but it’s actually just sad.
