Yes, Universal Health Care is a Good Idea

Photo by Gustavo Fring from Pexels

I’ve been thinking a lot about universal healthcare. I’m not going to use the term “Medicare for All” because I’m just about to sign up for Medicare, and I’m learning about all the things it doesn’t cover.

I’m going to say “universal healthcare” and I’m going to use it to mean that our tax dollars go into a fund to pay for our medical care. Just like the systems in place in most countries around the world.

What I’ve been thinking can be summed up in one sentence:

We’ve been sold a crock of shit when it comes to healthcare.

We’ve been told that the best way to get our medical care is through a profit-based system. We’ve been told that anything else would be “socialism, Marxism, communism”, that if we abandon our private insurance companies and profit-based hospitals, our world will come to an end, people will be dying in the gutters and the economy will collapse.

But I’ve been thinking.

If businesses large and small were free of the cost of their employees’ health insurance, wouldn’t they have more money to hire new workers? And more money to expand those businesses? Isn’t that how capitalism thrives?

And I’ve been thinking about this, too.