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?
too fuckin’ many, and how many sat this one out?
Could be 0, most people didn’t bother to vote in the last election.
36% of the eligible voting population did not vote.
I am not a mathematologist, but I’m pretty sure 36 is less than 62.
I thought I’d read it was higher, guess I am mistaken.
36+62=98 what did that last 2% do lol?
Not sure if I’m getting wooshed here, but in case you’re serious:
You’re adding percentages of two different groups
- 36% of voters did not vote, presumably 64% did
- 62% of voters want universal healthcare, presumably 38% don’t
It’s nonsensical to add 62+36 and wonder about the “missing” 2
Nah, I just fucked up and now will have to live with the shame lol. Thanks for the correction though.
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.
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.
The other 38% are either young and healthy enough to have never have had to deal with the healthcare industry or are just so staunchly individualistic they’d rather die than let someone else get a ‘handout’. ‘Taxes are theft’, ‘why should MY money go to blah’, me me me. Lack of empathy and/or a very naïve understanding of what society is actually for.
Red state here - the biggest argument I hear all the time is that if we get public healthcare the care quality will go down and we will have to wait 8 hrs to get seen for a heart attack. They point to Canada’s system and say most Canadians wish they had our system. So the answer, as always, is brainwashing.
. They point to Canada’s system and say most Canadians wish they had our system.
Most Canadians are extremely glad they don’t have our system.
and say most Canadians wish they had our system
So they lie.
Don’t forget government death panels.
Oh how could I forget about the government death panels! Yeah we’d much rather leave that to the insurance companies.
i say this as a huge supporter of single payer but also as a trans person.
in an ideal world, a national health system is great but then you also look at places like the uk where wait times for gender affirming care are up to four years and both puberty blockers are on the verge of being banned by the left of centre party.
The reasons for that, though, are largely because the NHS has been under attack by the right wing for more than a decade. It was a huge inflection point for Brexit, and there’s been a major effort to break it so they can point at how broken it is.
Don’t use the NHS issues to judge how such a system would or should work for trans care. It’s been actively sabotaged.
my point was that it’s susceptible to it in the first place… and the attacks on trans care come from both the tories and labour
All social* systems are susceptible to bigotry, and fascistic capitalism most of all.
Labour isn’t perfect by any stretch, but pretending both sides have been equally to blame is just as unfortunate in the UK as it is in the US, Germany, Australia, and Canada. One side may be slow to put your needs to the fore, but make no mistake, the other wants you dead.
TIL 38% of Americans are CEO’s
Temporarily embarrassed CEOs
TIL 38% of Americans are CEO’s and/or bootlickers.
FTFY
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.
Yeah, I mean… You ain’t getting shit with Trump.
I vote blue out of harm reduction, but don’t kid yourself.
The single greatest acheivement Democrats crow about was a healthcare band-aid originally conceived by the Heritage Foundation and instituted by a Republican governor designed to further enshrine private, for profit insurers like United Healthcare cut in as the entire point.
When the people screamed “Help us left wing from this for profit deathcare hell! Here’s a supermajority!” they protected the profit motive in what gets covered and declared victory.
They can make excuses, there’s always several, but as the decades go by and nothing changes, advocating patience starts to sound like “well just be patient, maybe my nepo great grandkids will magically decide to start being civil and equitable with your peasant great grandkids, lol.”
There is no planet on which UHC or anyone else wanted to be forced to cover patients with pre-existing conditions at anything resembling a reasonable cost.
Do I think Obama gave up way too much in negotiations? Absolutely. Do I think you’re a moron if you think this was “all part of private insurance’s master plan”? Absolutely.
There’s a reason Trump keeps talking about “replacing” Obamacare. And it’s not just his ego, private insurance wants it gutted.
For profit insurers absolutely did, because they did the math and knew the mandate would more than make up for the new rules, and it did, hence the ever rising profits since. I’m sure neoliberals and Republicans don’t see that as a problem because herp derp it’ll trickle down lol, but everyone else correctly does.
That was the supposed trade, but surprise surprise, for all the protections the ACA proponents claim it enshrines, they still find way to initially deny 1 out of 7 claims, and now some with AI.
Great deal, a larger captive customer base without a public option, and still denying swaths of claims using technicalities and loopholes their floors of attorneys never stopped working on in bad faith since. Because publicly traded companies never, ever operate in good faith towards their customers, there’s always an angle to goose earnings beyond what was overtly agreed to.
It helped some people, but it didn’t address the core problem of American Healthcare that makes it the most expensive on Earth with some of the worst outcomes in the developed world at all: the profit motive middleman dictating who gets what care instead of doctors. The more Americans who prepared for illness and paid them in good faith that they murder, the more gold in their pockets, to the applause of the profiteers on Wall Street.
Just to be clear, the primary negotiator for ACA was Biden, not Obama. What did he do? Biden immediately gave away the public option as a show of good faith so they could pass something with bipartisan compromise (which always means corpos are screwing the people.) The result was pretty much what we have today, 30mil extra Americans funneled into the pockets of private insurance companies for worse care at greater expense.
It sounds like you’re saying scrapping this and letting private insurers go back to not covering people with pre-existing conditions is Trump’s plan. Hope you’re wrong, that would be exceedingly cruel.
There shouldn’t be a profit motive in denying people healthcare - in fact healthcare should be a basic human right we guarantee to everyone in the richest country in the world, which means private insurers have no business in this business.
What did he do? Biden immediately gave away the public option as a show of good faith
Nope. We only lost the public option because of Joe Lieberman saying he wouldn’t support it and we needed all 60 Dem senators to vote for it.
I believe that was done as a compromised.
Rioting, violence, maybe a war, who knows, societal collapse? It’s all extremely interesting if not insanely frightening.
There’s tons in store for us over the next little while.
Here’s hoping the raving gangs of warlords that inherit the earth have a Morpheus type figure among them who is benevolent.
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.
Trump is open to hearing good ideas too. Problem is, “good” is highly subjective.
Candidates*
Real change will come from house and senate.
Removed by mod
and yet a good portion of y’all voted for trump and the republicans…
And a lot of people who want healthcare didn’t bother voting.
Your inactions have consequences.
“but I couldn’t vote for the Democrats in good faith!!!”
Well now you’ve helped elect Trump. Hope that aligns with your morals!
(General “you”, not you specifically)
Aren’t you concerned at all with the large number of people that are under represented by their choices in the voting booth?
State level electoral reform will give more political parties the chance to be involved in future elections with no chance of a spoiler effect.
People would be free to vote for their preferred candidate, safe in the knowledge that their vote would still be counted against the republicans.
Who could say no to more democracy? Who could possibly be against ensuring their fellow country men/women/and more are fully represented to the best of our ability? Republicans? Yes, of course they are against democracy. How about the democratic party? Do they support democracy?
More political parties means more chances to beat the Republicans. More political parties means more people are involved in politics. More people being involved in politics statistically means more votes for the democratic party.
Why is the DNC saying no to these easy extra votes? Why wouldn’t democrats use every tool at their disposal to defeat the republicans?
Perhaps they view their poltical party to be more important then the nation state itself. Party over country, at all costs.
Aren’t you concerned at all with the large number of people that are under represented by their choices in the voting booth?
Yes, but they should still vote. Anyone who didn’t vote decided that they’re okay with Trump. Generally, anyone not okay with Trump who didn’t vote is either stupid, ignorant, or lying about not being okay with Trump being elected.
State level electoral reform will give more political parties the chance to be involved in future elections with no chance of a spoiler effect.
Yeah, I agree. But you don’t have that. So we work with the system we have.
Who could say no to more democracy? Who could possibly be against ensuring their fellow country men/women/and more are fully represented to the best of our ability? Republicans? Yes, of course they are against democracy. How about the democratic party? Do they support democracy?
If you think that Trump is worse than the Democrat candidate, then you vote Democrat. Deciding not to vote doesn’t give you more democracy, it gives you less.
More political parties means more chances to beat the Republicans. More political parties means more people are involved in politics. More people being involved in politics statistically means more votes for the democratic party.
Not with FPTP. I’m in Canada, where we realistically have a 3-party system. What happens in some parts of the country (including Federally) is the Left vote gets split and the Right vote often ends up winning.
Why is the DNC saying no to these easy extra votes? Why wouldn’t democrats use every tool at their disposal to defeat the republicans?
If it were that simple and easy, they’d do it. But it’s not. If the Right doesn’t split too, and if FPTP isn’t replaced with something better, then the Left has just screwed itself out of ever being elected again.
Tbf the Democrats aren’t particularly interested in addressing healthcare either… the money has to be removed from the system for it to improve. It is currently working as designed.
So you’d rather live in a fascist dictatorship than a neoliberal semidemocracy?
The world doesn’t have to be this way, dragonfucker. False dichotomies only keep us in our place.
Yeah, you could have protests, and direct action, or even a revolution. Which are all way harder in a fascist dictatorship. You voted for the dichotomy.
The average American is stupid and thus easily confused. Hell, half of us read at a 6th grade level…
Only 23% of people living in the USA voted for Trump
That is 65% more than the percentage of people that, according to this post, dont want health coverage for everyone
23% voted for Trump, and 55% also indirectly did by not voting or going third-party.
Not “coverage”, “affordable coverage”. I don’t want coverage through whatever capitalist exploit insurance company. I want affordable healthcare without lifesucking middlemen
What about unaffordable healthcare only available to the top 1% – project 2025
The coverage the fire department provides is affordable. And my Library. And my streets. And the storm water system. And K-12.
Yeah but only sick people use healthcare so fuck them. /s
Capitalist healthcare is class eugenics. CMV.
That’s a single payer health system. Government pays the health providers You pay the government through taxes.
And the other 40% rely on the help and care of others every day while blabbering on about being “self-made” which actually just means “selfish asshole”.
America just voted to allow Ramaswamy and Elon to cut government by 75%. This will absolutely include healthcare. What will happen to that 75% that was under government? It will go to the private sector obviously. Now they can can become even richer. Holy shit Ramaswamy is like a real life Shooter McGavin
Thats not going to happen.
The only thing they love more than bitching about government overspending, is benefiting from it. The whole DOGE will have less power in the government than the meme it’s based on, and the people who will run it are looking to line their pockets with your money for the least effort on their part.
elon and ramaswamy are idiots sure but republicans will absolutely gut medicaid (first since it’s easier to take from disabled people than seniors) and the aca.
They wont gut Medicaid, they’re just going to force it to take on huge debt while they cut taxes for the 1% and then say that it’s Democrat’s fault for overspending.
Naw that one they will. They will straight up sell it to a company like UHC.
They need Congress to slaughter their sacred cows for that to happen.
* that actually pays out when you need something.
That’s the point of free at point of use health care.
Apologies if I’m preaching to the choir.
Then vote like you’re not fucking idiots.
Too late now.
Replace First-past-the-post voting with a more representative electoral system and the people will at least have the chance to vote intelligently.
And how are we going to do that when we gave the keys to the party that banned ranked choice voting in 10 states?
Were the 38% against, neutral, or just didn’t answer?
They have some form of decent coverage through work and no one in their personal sphere is overly sick to the point of causing them pain. They wish to block others from getting adequate access least they lose some advantage over them. They’re squarely in the F U I have mine camp. Of course as soon as something happens and theirs isn’t good enough, they’ll have a change of heart, while everyone else still in their camp holds them down.
“Muh tax dollars cant be wasted on someone else’s health”
Proceeds to vote for their tax dollars to be wasted on bailing out another business
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.
I’m wondering if this is like the British NHS and reports that “NHS pays 5 gazillion pounds for <med>” and the reality is we’re paying a fiver, or something.
Over 17% of our GDP goes to healthcare. Around 4.5 trillion dollars a year last I saw.
$4,500,000,000,000. And the people pay out of pocket still for most everything they need.
For reference, we pay more money than any other country besides China makes in an entire year.
Yeah, you’re done for. You’re paying more than if you had something like the NHS.
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.
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It will systemically punish Republican voters in Republican led states.
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Over time it will (in theory) massively shift the public consciousness in those areas around how badly they are getting fucked.
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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.
A lot of states are larger, both geographically and economically, than many European countries. What’s stopping those states from doing it?
You’re not comparing apples to apples.
Those EU countries have a hoard of social services available, from pre-school to free/relatively inexpensive higher education, to medical services, unions, pensions and elder care…a lot of services Americans have to pay for on top of any exchange of health care premium for state health care tax. I mean, there’s a huge difference between EU workers’ compensation, housing costs, and benefits work compared to US workers, how companies are taxed and pay into social services, and to make them comparable would require massive change. The US has faced “taxes are evil” propaganda for easily 40 plus years now, and getting the funding to create a care system from both citizens and corporations will require a miracle.
If universal healthcare is cheaper than private insurance (and most say it is) why not simply charge the citizens of, for example, California 4/5th of what they’re currently paying? What am I missing here? If they did that in my state it would save me around $100/mo
This is basically how it works in Canada, but when the health care system gets worse during conservative control of the provinces people aren’t blaming the conservatives and province they are blaming the federal government and the liberal party.
People have literally zero idea or care about what level controls things, they just want to blame “the other guy”
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38% probably on Medicare/Medicaid
lol was gonna say the same based on this headline
