I like to write short stories in my free time. One that I’ve been working on over the last year is one where the concept of “crowdfunded healthcare” evolves into a dystopian game show where people go on TV and share their sob story on why they need money. Then the viewers at home get to choose who gets the show’s prize money each season through a bracket style voting system that crowns a champion at the end. I had to…
> On that note, I find it supremely fucked up that people have to turn to crowdfunding to get their unexpected healthcare costs covered by benevolent internet citizens. So who should pay for it? All taxpayers instead? All countries that have tried that are now in the red. The only good solution, I think, it to work to make healthcare a lot cheaper in the long run.
Let's compare/contrast your own countrymen. The Department of Veterans Affairs (colloquially known as "the VA") is entirely funded by the US budget[0]. Guess where the US budget comes from.
The VA, among many other services, provides "free" healthcare to veterans who are 50% or more disabled[1]. Sure, it's not entirely universal healtcare but...
Then we look at the Children's Health Insurance Program (colloquially known as "CHIP"). Again, not entirely universal healthcare. However, the federal government matches states governments fundings[2] and the program is designed to reach the poorest (children) in the nation.
Then, of course, you have Medicaid[3].
Essentially, for the disadvantaged, there is some level of concern and you have an approximation (if not out-right full) universal healthcare for some of them; otherwise, enter the "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" mentality comes into play.
Apologies for the seemingly long diatribe of a soapbox but it seems hypocritical to say that taxpayers paying for healthcare is a bad thing when you - quite literally - do it for a sub-group of your populace.
>The only good solution, I think, is to work to make healthcare a lot cheaper in the long run.
As a comparator, surgery to remove a lipoma in the Emerald Isle costs about 800 quid[4] but this cost is about 1,725 quid[5] in the states.
So, there's an argument to made that Universal Healthcare can make the overall costs of healthcare far cheaper.
...and this is not to mention the gratuitous amount of money you'd be saving on the budget by condensing all of those government departments down into a much smaller government, yeah?
[0] - https://www.va.gov/budget/products.asp
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ve...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Health_Insurance_Pr...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid
[4] - https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/health/health_services...