“I went into frontline medicine to help people, not to bankrupt them,” writes Sophia Spadafore. “When someone who does not have insurance comes into the ER, I am forced to discuss with the patient what necessary care they may have to delay or forgo”:
Why do Americans put up with this?
Republicans seem to have turned into a cult that believes inflicting suffering is good. A lot of people don't pay attention to this stuff and our news media is generally doing a poor job. I guess we're going to find out how far that can push that. It's insane.
Heck, about our news media, even when it does report on this stuff, many people on the right just dismiss bad news as lies. Fox and similar outlets are the worst here, of course. But most of our news seems more interested in appearing neutral over informing people with the truth.
For deeper reasons, a lot of it is rooted in racism. We doing have universal healthcare because this with racist sentiments don't want to give 'handouts' to non-whites. And program that these people think* benefits minorities more has a lot less public support. *Doesn't need to be true.
Europe has racism too, of course, but it's avoided having racists break or fight welfare programs because it's far more homogeneously white than the US.
Europe is in no way perfect by any means, but one thing we do have right is not putting medical staff in this position or our citizens in the morgue or bankruptcy courts
Racism has a lot to do with why the US has far fewer and worse social welfare programs. Polls show a lot less support for anything perceived* to benefit minorities more than white. Europe avoids this because it's far more white. *Doesn't need to be true. Propaganda does a lot of work here.
One of the impacts of the refugee crisis in Europe is support for welfare programs went down. Especially in areas dealing with more refugees. Ugly, but true.
Matthew do some more digging mate. For example in the UK illegal immigrants are NOT entitled to free healthcare except in the case of an emergency they can’t pay for. The overall cost to the NHS budget represents a minuscule amount of the £205bn budget
Not what I said, now is it? You guys literally left the EU because of racism. So maybe just take my original point for what it's worth.
Bear in mind that I haven't looked at polls on this for Europe in years. But we can see that far right groups that want to radically change how their countries work are in the rise. Hard to get rid of programs like this once they are entrenched.
And, to be fair, Trump simply outright lied about protecting Medicare and Medicaid.
Healthcare is a human right and should be implemented as communal responsibility. America's pay more for healthcare than any other nation, and have the worst life expectancy in the industrial world. Hooray? We're the shitty line on the graph. But at least UnitedHealthcare makes billions.
