One Big Reason Why Americans are Iffy on Public Healthcare

Healthcare seems like a personal subject.

In the year of a menacing virus, there has been a lot of hysteria with regards to the health behaviors of our fellow citizens. Restaurant workers must wear masks to operate, workers in an office require masks to not get a stink-eye by other staff, and customers must wear a mask in order to shop in a Menards.

Today I’m hoping to step away from the more abstract concepts to communicate the stigma and zeitgeist of public healthcare from an American perspective by introducing some of the key differences between Americans and the rest of the world.

So what’s the rest of the world like?

Japan

Japan has one of the highest rating public healthcare systems in the world, despite spending the least of all the countries that have one. It is also home to the healthiest population in the world due to it’s cultural values. Keep this in mind for later.

The British Isles

Well, one of the organizations that many point to when looking at single-payer healthcare would be the England’s National Healthcare Service (NHS). This was a program that emerged in the 1950s era of heavy bureaucracy in Europe. It is one of the worst services in Europe. It was implemented in a web of bureacracy, and various administrations had to keep cutting costs to keep it even remotely efficient. Towards the 1990s, Tony Blair had basically identified the weakness of the NHS as having a lack of a competitive market. Since the NHS was a monolith under which everything else needed to operate, these market forces needed to be artificially placed in the form of quotas and standards. While this made it more cost-efficient, it has lead to a steep drop in quality.

Scotland dodged the actions of Tony Blair and operate their own NHS. They saw the bureaucracy as an obvious weakness and worked to lower it at the national level while having health boards throughout Scotland run by local jurisdictions to specifically care for their respective region’s needs. Kudos to them.

France

France has a much more attractive system at a glance to foreigners. A popular feature of the French system is that a mother gets a personal nurse assigned to them by the government to help with medical needs until the child is old enough to kindergarten (which is also publicly funded). What many may be thinking by now is “That sounds pretty expensive.”

And yes, it is. France allocates about 12-15% of its annual budget to healthcare, every french citizen must pay a portion of their income (a tax?!?) proportional to their income to a health insurance fund, and taxes on gambling go straight to the National Health Insurance Fund.

The functionality of the Ministry of Social Affairs, Health and Woman’s Rights in France can only do the above example due to the large amount of funds it.

So why can’t America decide on if Public Healthcare is useful?

Aside from many Americans dismissing Public Healthcare as Communism, the ideas of a national health system are rather diverse in nature. When an American politician talks about public healthcare, they usually only talk about how much they like it and how much it would benefit everyone by having it. They would not accurately picture what it would mean for the country, how it would be structured.

Would Americans even be willing to fund such a program that would definitely require the ordinary worker to pay more taxes in order to meet the high price to obtain such a public service? Even if so there’s a hidden issue (reference the title) that would also need to happen in order to see the true benefits of having a Public Healthcare system.

Coke tastes different in Europe.

This is largely due to the governments of Europe generally restricting the usage of sugars and corn syrup in products. Using cartoon mascots to advertise sugary snacks to children is also illegal. Sugars, fat, tobacco, and alcohol are generally taxed higher in European nations. The point is that the government (and therefore the public) has invested themselves into your health. A public fund in a country where everyone is sick would quickly dry up. Naturally this means that it is of interest to prevent health issues before they start. This is does not begin with health insurance, but rather the actions of the citizens.

America is currently a country where if you are morbidly obese, then the one footing the bill in the end of the day to get treatment would be yourself. You would pay with your health and your finances. Contrast this with one who is a citizen in a country with a public system. Suddenly that morbidly obese person is becoming a leech on society, as your treatment is being funded by other people.

Does a country that has independence and personal responsibility as its core values really want this kind of system, where the people (and the government) as a whole start to influence such a “personal” aspect of life by making it harder to make unhealthy decisions?

Americans have a track record of being opposed to government attempts to force them to become healthier. New York City has tried in the past to limit the size of soft drink containers only to be met with opposition and leading the idea to be largely rejected.

Without the conversation about how the American population is now fatter than ever, one cannot hope to even begin to advocate for a national healthcare system as good as France. The United States is too vast to be efficiently bureaucratic (see England’s mistake), Americans would be unwilling to pay (see New York opposition), and the political landscape of the USA as a whole makes this topic extremely difficult to debate about on television. There is no bipartisan support for having a healthcare system to promote the public good that both democrats and republicans can agree on. If such a system passed under one administration, it will be replaced as soon as the opposing party takes control.

A much better system, would be to have public healthcare at a state level.

The states already have a way of introducing rather novel laws and orders and that is by letting the ideas be introduced in states whenever the state feels it worth it to do so. We have already seen this kind of idea in the decriminalization of marijuana in many states (which is taxed rather highly in states where it is legal in, hey that sounds a bit familiar). This way states can decide what is best for its people and it will either work or not. Regardless other states can look at what other states are doing and iron out the kinks when/if they introduce similar legislation. This would be a lot like how Scotland handles their NHS, with local boards determining what is needed and people advocating within their community to get the right amount of control that is desired.

How this somehow ties to COVID-19

I don’t really like talking about the coronavirus, but it has been made abundantly clear to me that there are many types of personal preferences when it comes to personal health. There are some who are still afraid to venture outside, some who don’t seem to care at all and just want things back to normal, and some that are in between. This partisanship is starting to reveal itself as businesses reopen, but with a catch. The health of the public is dependent on the actions of the individuals within the public. A virus is a very dramatic way of showing the concepts I wrote above. The reality is though is that people can have this consciousness of public health all the time if they are willing. If the people are not willing, then a ham-fisted healthcare system will flop spectacularly as it will not do what the people want it to. I have been paying more attention to my personal health nowadays and have realized how stacked the odds are simply due to the geography of living in America. I hope that you can chew on this for your own lives. Thanks for reading.