If there should be anything free in this world, it’s health care.
Every person on the planet has the right to live. We should NOT have to pay money to exist. The fact that money now trumps life itself on a national scale in some countries is so incredibly vile it actually makes me feel ill. A government is meant to look after its populace, and that means if someone needs (and I mean needs, electives don’t count) an operation or some kind of medicine just to survive then they should be taken care of. We’re human fucking beings, not pawns on a chess board for god’s sake.
The worst part is the people who actually support privatized health care. They go around like two year old children who won’t let anyone share their toys. “I don’t want my money to go to some fat bastard who’s too lazy to lose weight and gets a gastric bypass instead.” Well fuck off, you asshat– what about all the other millions of good, hard-working people out there who would benefit from it? What about the kid in the wheelchair who needs therapy so he may be able to walk again? What about the dearly loved grandmother whose life could be saved by an operation to get rid of her cancer? What about those people?
How would you feel if it were you? Your child? Your grandmother? How would you feel if their lives were at stake and some asshat insurance company just took one look and said “yeah, don’t think so, sorry, your life is meaningless.” Fuck off. Just fuck off. For every one “fat bastard” there’s millions of decent folk out there who just plain can’t afford to fork out the thousands of dollars it would cost to give them any sort of chance at life. That is LIFE. A basic motherfucking human RIGHT. Why has everyone forgot this?
So what if it means your taxes will be a little higher– at the end of the day it balances out, and not only is your ass looked after, but you can feel good in knowing that you, in some small way, are helping to save lives.
Quality of life > money. Fuck money, and fuck what it’s done to society, and fuck all you pricks who value it over life itself.
Stop being such cunts and remember life is about having health, happiness, and people you love around you– not some colourful piece of paper and a couple of petty pieces of change.
Disgusting.
That’s something that I don’t like about the USA, it’s the still prevailing free-for-all Wild West mentality. If you make it well good for you but if you fail at any point well better luck next life. Not even is the lack of empathy and solidarity that is characteristic of and inherent to human societies revolting, but it’s also the fact that even from a cynical pragmatic point of view, ensuring the welfare of anyone is still in the best interest of society as a whole. Besides, the idea that some people won’t go to the doctor when they have a condition because they can’t afford it is frankly quite scary. (Disclaimer, I’m from France so I take things like free universal health care and a lack of death penalty for granted)
Concerning health care in general there’s something that I find more shocking, it is that we let “big pharma” get away with anti-competitive behaviour (by aggressively making sure their medicine isn’t reproduced by anyone for much cheaper) which result “big pharma” making huge profits while people/organisations/governments cannot afford the medicines/vaccines/etc needed to cure such thing as epidemics like AIDS.
As for individual people being egoistic, I came across a whole lot of libertarians on the Internet, and I find these people quite amazing. It’s not just their tenuous grip on reality or their utter lack of empathy for other humans, it’s how they justify their egoism. They earn 6 or 7 figure salaries, but they don’t want to pay taxes (they’d rather “pay for what they choose to pay for”, I kid you not), they complain about how much they pay in taxes (which in the US is never more than 35% if I’m not mistaken, which is not that much), they don’t care if their taxes could save children or give people a better education, and on top of that they stubbornly deny that they’ve ever benefited from taxes in their life. Reminds me of that actor from The District who while arguing against taxes said “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No.” lol…
Anyway, I think that’s one of those things that we find acceptable when it’s all we’ve known but that later, when things have changed, we look back and find it unacceptable. I think it should be a duty of the state to ensure the reasonable welfare of anyone, be it education, shelter, food or health. I think it’s a shame that we let people die of cold in the streets, that we don’t take care of people with mental health conditions (often due to substance abuse) and instead let them live and die like stray dogs.
Ah also I find it worrying that any nation would let unchecked private industries be in charge of what should be a public service. That’s exactly the problem with healthcare in the USA. Basically, the government lets you entirely down when it comes to healthcare, your only option (no matter how rich you are) is to rely on unregulated for-profit companies which will do anything to maximise their profits, hence the whole “pre-existing conditions” thing (because they’ll do anything they can to dump anyone who’s actually going to cost them money). That’s a shame, because that’s like having the government telling to private entrepreneurs “have the healthcare of our nation, do whatever you want with it, you can provide healthcare only for those who don’t need it for all we care”. That’s exactly what’s happening, that’s entirely surrendering what should be a public service to rapacious profit-seeking companies, with nothing put in place to ensure that these guys do anything for the benefit of people. Sadly since the 1970s the dominant ideological movement was aiming at just that, let’s make everything private and let the whole thing run itself. As if a company’s profit-maximising interests were always aligned with the nation’s best interests.
TL;DR: All these guys are dumbasses. :)