This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “One of the arguments against universal health coverage in America is that we are giving poor people something for nothing. So how are European countries able to avoid this while offering universal health coverage?”
They don’t avoid that, but those who argue against universal healthcare are more fixated on hating the poor than they are on understanding how “giving the poor something for nothing” results in superior healthcare at half the cost for themselves.
The cost-based mentality is surprisingly dumb when they can’t comprehend how much they can save when considering expenditures as investments rather than losses.
It is precisely this thinking that Donald Trump has been leveraging to send the nation into a recession.
Conservative thinking tends to be so very short-sighted that when they claim to be fiscally responsible, all they’re doing is showing the world they’re incapable of stimulating growth.
Conservative thinking about healthcare epitomizes their fiscal incompetence.
Fiscal issues are entirely based on a revenue versus costs model, but conservatives seem capable of understanding only one column on their balance sheet.
The capacity for creativity is why liberals excel in the revenue generation side of the balance sheet. Conservatives could learn some valuable lessons about fiscal competence from liberals if they weren’t so close-minded and filled with hateful bigotry.
Caring for the poor is how we bring out the best for everyone at the lowest cost.
It should not be a business because it’s a public service, just like the military and the police… just like education should be.
When public services are operated with a profit-driven mindset, they deviate from their intended purpose, becoming corrupt and inefficient. This distortion invariably leads to their failure to serve the people.
Some things should never be run as businesses because their priorities are not profits but service, a value inherent to and critical for delivering effective public services.
It’s a fundamental truth that the primary goal of any business is profit. However, this profit-driven approach is incompatible with providing high-quality service. The two cannot coexist.
In business, one can choose only two out of three options between speed, price, and quality. It is a business mantra that recognizes you can only provide some of the three.
People who fail to understand business also fail to understand community development because you can’t provide a high-quality public service if profit is involved in any capacity. It is for this reason that all election campaigns should be publicly funded instead of privately financed for the profiteers who have corrupted the political landscape while transforming the nation into a fascist corporatocracy.
Restraining corruption within the political landscape demands a wall between business and state in the same fashion that a wall should exist between church and state. As institutions, they should not directly influence the other two’s nature, shape, or operation.
Corporations are medieval institutions based on authoritarian structures. Because of that, they cannot help but corrupt democracies, just like churches are also authoritarian structures capable only of corrupting the operations of a state.
The only efficient and effective way to operate a national healthcare system is to provide high quality at the lowest cost. The only way to achieve that goal is to pool all resources together and leverage a basic economic strategy called “economy of scale.”
As a citizen and a consumer, you apply that same strategy each time you buy something in bulk.
This isn’t rocket science, and the fact that the U.S. still can’t get its act together to do the right thing for its citizens is a testament to how badly corrupted by billionaires the nation has become.
The fact is that billionaires have invested a lot of money in programming people to believe the government is inefficient. The truth, however, is that all organizations become inefficient the larger they become.
The real solution to many problems the U.S. and the world are struggling with is acknowledging that “too big to fail” means “too big to exist.” No multinational corporation should exist today. No centibillionaires should exist today.
We’ve made a horrendous error in judgment by allowing power to be concentrated in the hands of the few. The consequence of that corruption is that a majority are now struggling needlessly when they were prospering only a few decades ago.
Community development is a service we provide for each other as part of the social contract.
There are plenty of opportunities outside of community service to make profits. There is no justification for turning every waking moment into a monetization opportunity — for anyone- and creating a culture in which that’s the expectation, which is a dysphoric consequence of a dysfunctional state of being that will sustain itself indefinitely.
As we have entered the late stages of capitalism, we can either adjust course toward a healthier and sustainable existence, or we will invite chaos into all our lives. We can stave that off by simply adjusting our biases. The first bias to change is acknowledging that healthcare is NOT a business.
Plenty of for-profit business opportunities exist within an endeavour as massive as healthcare. Like any non-profit enterprise working within a zero-based budget context, private industries are still free to operate on a for-profit basis. For a service as massive as a national healthcare system, that presents an incredible array of opportunities for innovation and competition by and between for-profit industries. The critical difference is that the decision-making body or board governing the healthcare operation isn’t distracted from providing essential services by a for-profit mandate.
There exists neither a need nor justification for basing the service provided to save lives on catering to a profit motive. It’s the worst way to serve a public with an inferior service at a cost that’s much more excessive than money because the price includes the lives of innocent people who are unfairly and unnecessarily made desperate to survive.
thotbag 