Universal healthcare: 7 bogus reasons haters gonna hate

They’re uniquely American: Apple pie, fireworks on the Fourth of July, and football that’s not really soccer.

Oh, and opposition to universal healthcare. Yeah, it’s pretty damned American. The United States is the only one of 33 developed countries that didn’t have it before the Affordable Care Act took effect, and the haters are doing everything they can to get rid of that.

The idea behind true universal health care, under a single-payer plan (a single entity, the government, pays all the costs), is even more controversial... here. Elsewhere? Not so much. The U.K.’s had it since 1948, Sweden since 1955 and Canada since 1966. Even in the (gasp) Middle East, countries like Kuwait, Bahrain and Brunei have had it for more than half a century.

So, what gives? Why all the hating on universal healthcare?

I can think of seven reasons, and they don’t paint a pretty picture.

1. It’s all about us

The main argument I hear on TV is that a single-payer system “will force me to give up my private insurance” (insert whiny-baby sound here).

In other words, it’s all about me. I want to drive a Chevy, and I’d rather force my neighbors to walk than drive a Ford myself instead. Yeah, that’s in imperfect analogy, I admit — all analogies are. We’re not talking about motor vehicles here. We’re talking about life and death. What these critics are really saying is, “I’d rather see my neighbor six feet under than deal with the possibility of seeing a different doctor.”

Pay higher taxes when I’m healthy to make sure my neighbor can pay for the treatment needed to survive diabetes or a heart condition? Perish the thought! In fact, one website that presents the pros and cons of universal health care lists this as the No. 1 “con”: The sickest 5% of the population creates 50% of the health care costs.

Call it a lack of empathy, because it is. Call it a lack of community, because we’re all “rugged individualists” who look out for number one, because we do. It’s funny that those who most loudly proclaim the United States to be a “Christian country” seem most eager to ignore the whole “love thy neighbor as thyself” thing. Because that’s what they’re doing.

2. We have short memories

Today’s Americans weren’t around back then, but there was a time (before the 1920s) when America’s roads weren’t what they are today. Most of them were dirt or gravel, and those that passed for “highways” zigzagged all over the place.

In those days, roads were built by merchants who had businesses by the roadside. They wanted the main highway to pass by their businesses, even if it meant a miles-long detour from the most direct route. Roads that didn’t provide these merchants with the business they wanted went unpaved and unmaintained. Motorists went there at their own risk.

Roads were a hot mess. One highway offered three alternate alignments, another carried eight different trail markers, and still another overlapped with 11 other trails. It was hard to keep track of anything.

That’s what it’s like for doctors dealing with multiple insurance companies. It costs them more time and money to do so, and that cost is passed along as billable hours.

Private auto trails, like the health of today’s privately insured patients, were selectively maintained — depending on their profitability. The Federal Highway Administration put it this way: “Most routes followed their financial support, and it was impossible to integrate many of them into any logical highway system.”

Substitute the words “insurance companies” for “routes” and “medical” for “highway,” and you’ve got our current situation in a nutshell. Oh, and while you’re at it, replace the word “logical” with “humane.” They both work.

3. We don’t trust government

Does the government always make good decisions? Of course not. Nobody does. The state of California spent billions on a still-unfinished bullet train, then put the bulk of the project on hold because of cost overruns.

But insurance company decisions are a lot worse: “We won’t pay for the treatment that will save your life because it cuts into my profit margin.”

It doesn’t matter if you flatline as long as their bottom line is protected.

Big government isn’t the definition of evil. Letting someone die when you can save them comes a whole lot closer to fitting that bill.

4. It’s “socialism”

Instead of looking at the facts, we tend to react to label. Like “socialism.” Critics use this word to describe universal healthcare, because they know we’re too lazy to think for ourselves. We’d rather get spoon-fed tweets and 30-second soundbites than read the fine print or (heaven forbid) do any research of our own. We’ve got the attention span of a gnat.

That’s particularly dangerous in a society driven by the phrase caveat emptor — let the buyer beware. Businesses use this mantra to foist responsibility for their irresponsibility off onto the consumer. But they don’t really want buyers to beware. They want them to stay ignorant so they can sell them a bill of goods.

The easiest way to put one over on someone is to sell them a label, rather than encourage them to look at what’s inside. (This is why companies don’t like laws that force them to list ingredients on the box.) Joseph McCarthy used the word “communism” to strike fear into the hearts of Americans during the Cold War, and the universal healthcare haters use the word “socialism” the same way now.

Guess what? Medicare is socialism. The federal highway system is socialism. The public education system is socialism. Public safety — police and firefighting — is socialism. The armed forces are socialism. They’re government programs paid for by a common fund, which is supported by taxes.

Maybe you want to go back to an era of armed militias, vigilante justice, dirt roads and illiterate children. I don’t, and I don’t think most of us do. If we adopt universal healthcare, we won’t want to go back to the age of insurance companies, either.

5. Our priorities suck

We get spooked when we find out something in our water has a 1% greater chance of causing cancer if we drink 20 gallons a day, yet we go into denial about our chance of survival plummeting by 50% (or more) if we don’t get the proper health care.

We balk at the cost of universal health care, which, admittedly, is expensive. It would cost somewhere between $1.4 trillion and $2.5 trillion a year, depending on the estimate, which would make it the single biggest expense in our budget. Compare that to defense spending, at $934 billion, and it sounds like a big investment. But when you do a cost-benefit analysis, the ledger tilts decidedly in the other direction.

The U.S. spends more on defense than China, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the U.K., Germany and even Russia... combined. And we do so despite the fact that we live in a relatively safe geographic area: insulated on two sides by water, and on two other sides by countries that pose zero military threat. Russian tanks aren’t going to come rumbling across our border any time soon.

Yes, nearly 3,000 people died during a foreign attack on our soil on 9/11, and 2,403 died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Compare that to 45,000 Americans who die every year because they’re uninsured. According to a new study, a shift toward single-payer healthcare would save 68,000 lives (and $450 billion!)

The money we spend on taxes, most of which would be paid by those in high-income brackets, we’ll save by eliminating $500 prescription costs, copays and $100,000 hospital stays. Why are we so scared about the relatively low prospect of foreign invasion while we ignore the very real danger of catastrophic illness? You tell me.

6. We live in denial

Americans hate to look at the future. We allow ourselves to get sucked into student loans instead of working our way through college, or buying on credit because we need that shiny new play-toy now.

Global warming? What’s that?

It doesn’t matter that 97% of scientists agree that it’s happening, and that we human beings are the primary cause. (That’s according to a website run by NASA, which is part of the same administration that’s trying to minimize the danger of climate change.) We don’t want to hear about it. It’s too inconvenient.

Americans who live in denial would rather side with 3% of scientists who don’t believe global warming is a thing, just like they’d rather side with the 0% of other developed countries that don’t offer universal healthcare.

Remember what I said about 50% of the costs going to the 5% who are sickest? That doesn’t seem quite fair, does it? Until you realize that those sickest 5% aren’t always the same people. One day, the people in that other 95% are going to get sick, and it could happen before they qualify for Medicare. Leukemia, diabetes, HIV and other catastrophic illnesses can strike at any time. If they hit you, you’ll find yourself in that sickest 5%. Yeah, you were healthy before, but what now?

7. We hate change

In many ways, it all boils down to is a fear of the unknown. We’re comfortable with the status quo, and we don’t want to deal with doing things a little differently.

At the same time, we’re a nation that loves to gamble on long shots. We buy lottery tickets, even though our chances of winning are infinitesimal. We take 20-1 odds at the racetrack because the potential payoff is bigger. We invest in risky stocks for the same reason.

And we gamble with our health care rather than placing a safer bet. Again, we’d rather live in denial that we won’t get sick (which really alters the status quo) than have the guts to do something about it now — something that, even if it doesn’t affect us in this moment, could save someone else’s life. Or thousands of them.

What if we stopped being afraid of universal health care and started being afraid of what really should scare us? A catastrophic illness that will leave us bankrupt, chronically sick or even dead. The same situation for our neighbor, who we’re supposed to be loving “as ourselves.” The guilt that comes with failing to do that or, far worse, the callous indifference to our neighbor’s suffering: the lack of a conscience or moral compass.

This is the crossroads at which we find ourselves. Once upon a time, “America” meant courage, helping our neighbors and taking responsibility for our actions. Our reaction to universal healthcare is a test of whether it still does.

Photo by Steve Rhodes, used under Creative Commons 2.0 license