@izzythepush,
izzythepush wrote:
Getting rid of Universal Health Care in favour of a market led system amounts to killing the poor by neglect.
Perhaps in the UK this is true, but then I don't know if prior to Universal Health Care, people without insurance had no alternative but to pay for healthcare themselves. I suspect not, but honestly don't know for certain and am not inclined to research the matter.
The absence of Universal Health Care in the US is not killing poor people.
It certainly is inutitive that poor people, in general, are less healthy than their counterparts in higher economic classes, and I imagine there are loads of studies and statistics to support this belief, but UHC is incapable of eliminating all of the contributing factors.
Poor people in the US smoke more than those in higher economic classes. There isn't, yet, a miraculous drug or treatment that will prevent people from smoking.
Poor people in the US, in general, eat less nutritional meals than do those in higher economic classes. I don't imagine UHC will result in their being fed three nutritionally balanced meals a day.
Poor people in the US, in general, are less educated and more ignorant than those in higher economic classes. This, of course, leads to a multitude of health related problems. UHC will not solve this issue.
Poor people in the US, in general, live in less hygenic environments than those in higher economic classes. UHC will not relocate them or insure that they maintain a higher level of hygene.
I would guess that most people will not have too much to argue with concerning these four factors (although I am often surprised by what is challenged in this forum).
This probably not the case with the fifth factor I will cite: Poor decision making.
The contraversy around this factor will center on the degree to which one believes that people are responsible for their personal situations. It would be wrong to suggest that everyone, in the US, who is poor, is totally responsible for their economic conditions, as this would ignore factors that are outside of an individual's control: parentage, physical and mental disabilities, youthful misdeeds etc, but it is also wrong to suggest that they are entirely innocent victims of external forces.
There are higher rates of addiction and alcoholism among the poor in the US than in higher economic classes. Whether this is because poverty leads to abuse of these substances or the life choices that can lead to poverty often include substance abuse, or both, such abuse clearly doesn't lead to good health, and UHC cannot solve this problem.
An argument can be made that the poor children who suffer from the lousy and selfish decisions of their parents are not guilty of poor decision making, and it would be true, but their conditions would be no less due to poor decision making.
An argument can also be made that poor life decisions are hardly limited to the poor, and this would be valid as well, but as these decisions tend to lead to unfavorable economic outcomes and it seems a logical conclusion that they would be concentrated among those who are poor.
All this is not to say that the poor don't deserve healthcare, but to argue that it is cleary not enough to simply make such healthcare available, and that poor people will continue to die from the causes and effects of poverty irrespective of whether or not it is available.
In the absence of UHC, poor people, at least in the US, have available healthcare. There is Medicaid, and Hospitals cannot turn people away because they have no money. These may not be the the most effective or efficent means of making healthcare available to the poor, but the poor who are seriously ill in America are not doomed to die of their illness simply because they are poor or that UHC doesn't exist.
The answer, in my opinion, isn't to create a system whereby the level of healthcare available is reduced to a point where it is possible to afford providing it to everyone. The current system needs reform and there is a role for the government in that reform, but creating another, bloated bureaucratic entitlement program is not that role. ObamaCare might have been a sucessful endeavor had it not been ramroded down everyone's throats in the quest to achieve partisan victories; with almost no care being given to how it might actually work.
The answer is for America as a nation, not a piggy bank of tax dollars, to address the issues that result in people living in poverty. This is a huge, and probably impossible task , but it would be encouraging to see, at least, an effort being made.
