A Modest Proposal For Universal Healthcare

So here I sit, in my post-DNC convention funk. Call me a Bernie Bro, call me what you will, but I am bitterly disappointed to know that, moving forward, the bright and shining and all-too-brief dream I had this last year will almost certainly remain just that: a dream.

That dream was universal taxpayer-funded healthcare. That, more than any other hot button issue, is the one I personally cared about the most. As a person who has only had insurance for very brief periods in my life, I believe that universal healthcare is precisely the sort of thing that government ought to be about — if you assume that the point of a nation’s government is to make life better for its citizens, rather than to, I dunno, make trade agreements and start otherwise pointless wars to increase shareholder value for its corporations.

But alas, I am told by both conservatives and “moderate” liberals that universal healthcare in America is utterly unrealistic, despite the fact that every other civilized country — and a few uncivilized ones, like Canada — already has it. There are too many of us, and the costs are too high, and there’s no political will for it. (All of those Sanders voters were only concerned with legalizing weed and free college, apparently.)

“Figure out a way to fund it,” my moderate liberal friends said, “and I’ll support it. But there isn’t any real way to do it.”

“Figure out how to support it without raising any taxes in the slightest or giving anything to people who didn’t work hard for it,” said my conservative friends, “and I’ll support it. Also no healthcare for welfare queens or thugs.”

You can imagine my despondence. And then, tonight, as I was sitting in the Huntridge Tavern here in Las Vegas, it hit me. I hit upon the perfect solution: one that is in line with corporatism on both the Left (well, the “Left”) and the Right; one that speaks to our rugged individualism; one that is sufficiently “pragmatic” — because a man’s grasp must exceed his reach, or else what’s a representative democracy for?

And best of all, my solution would cover most or all of that money that would otherwise be earmarked for more useful things than universal healthcare, like bailing out corrupt and stupid bankers or building fighter planes that don’t fly.

Here is my solution: we privatize all law enforcement below the state level, nationally.

Now, before you rise up angrily to call me a Randian libertarian or a neo-reactionary, let me assure you, I’m the absolute opposite of that. I’m a democratic socialist. I hate late-stage corporate consumer capitalism. Nor am I an anarchist, nor do I hate cops or freedom or America. Not at all.

Just bear with me here. I got a thing for this. This is gonna take a while.

* * *

We make the assumption in our society that we need to maintain a police force in every town and city in America — that we would otherwise devolve into chaos and madness; y’know, like The Purge, except all the time. We need to give our police officers as much of our tax dollars as possible to keep the peace.

But let’s look at what cops really do, in our society. Outside of your city’s criminal investigation division — the detectives, in other words — what most cops do is they drive around and enforce traffic laws that nobody really cares about and that don’t really matter. You know how I know nobody cares about them? Because literally everybody breaks them all the time. If you’ve never done fifty in a forty-five, if you’ve never failed to signal when changing lanes, if you’ve never parked in a red zone just to jump out even though it’s illegal no matter if you’re there for two seconds or two hours…well, you’re a lying-ass liar ass.

You know how I know that these laws don’t really matter? Because literally everybody breaks them all the time. If making an illegal U-turn or driving fifty in a forty-five — or let’s be really honest, sixty in a forty-five because that jackoff in the Subaru took like two minutes to accelerate from the stoplight and you’ve got places to be — if this was really a vastly dangerous and reckless act, a lot more people would die on the road than already do, because millions and millions of people do it every two seconds in America and almost none of them, statistically speaking, actually crash into other people or run over babies or whatever other terrible thing we think is going to happen.

In fact, cops actually stop and ticket or arrest an infinitesimal number of the people actually committing traffic violations at any given moment. I know this because I drive like a goddamn Ringwraith bearing down on Frodo to steal back the One Ring pretty much all the time I’m behind the wheel of a car, and I’ve gotten two speeding tickets in my life, and one of those was for going thirty-seven in a thirty-five. No, seriously. (I was an eighteen year old with a shitty old pimp car in a rich neighborhood. They stopped me just to ask me why I was even there on the regular. Luckily, I’m white, so I survived.)

So we know that, from the traffic perspective, and purely from a statistical standpoint, police are fabulously bad at actually preventing or even punishing crime. And when they do, what good does it do? Does it stop people from committing these offenses? No. Nobody stops speeding after they get pulled over the first time. They just look in their rearview a little more carefully when they do it.

And the money raised from traffic tickets? Where does most of that money go? Right back to the cops that wrote the tickets. It’s how they raise a lot of their budget — by occasionally catching people doing things that everybody does anyway and nobody really minds, except for cops… and based on the cops I’ve known, they really only mind fast and ludicrous driving when other people who aren’t cops do it.

But aside from traffic, what do cops do with their time? Based on my experience as a lifetime American citizen, they seem to mostly drive around and stop random black people who are driving or walking or standing or not standing, and white people if they look poor, and handcuff them on the hoods of their cop cruisers and check them for drugs or, I don’t know, broadswords or something, since it’s hella legal to carry a gun here.

Drug laws are stupid. I don’t know anyone who’s not a religious fanatic or a mentally crippled shut-in who really believes that marijuana ought to be illegal, especially when booze isn’t. I personally don’t think that any drugs ought to be illegal, because I’ve known far more people who’ve fucked up their own lives and the lives of others with booze than, say, with heroin, and yet you can sit in your apartment and piss your life away with Rolling Rock and reality TV and nobody says boo. This is stupid. Paying police to arrest people for possessing and using drugs is stupid.

So what else? Well, there’s violent crime and property crime. Cops rarely prevent violent crime. That’s not their fault, it’s just simple logistics: most violent crimes happen pretty quickly, and by the time a cop can show up, they’re usually over. I mean, sometimes cops stop rapes or robberies or murders in progress, but let’s be real here: far more often, a cop doesn’t stop these things. Nobody does. Cops are kind of like God’s janitors: they clean up the mess after horrible shit happens.

At least they do with violent crime. Property crime? Well, I’ll put it this way: most of the time, if somebody breaks into your house and steals your stuff, the cops might show up or might not. They might just as likely tell you to come into the station and file a report. And while I’m not sure how to even look up the statistics of how many stolen TVs are returned to their rightful owners, from all anecdotal evidence I’ve heard, if a dude steals your TV, you might as well just go buy a new one, because you probably ain’t getting it back.

All in all, I’d guess that less than 10% of a given cop’s time on the street is spent actually preventing crimes that people really want prevented, and the rest is spent enforcing stupid laws that nobody cares about except the kind of people who still write angry letters to the editor of Reader’s Digest.

And then there’s the whole “shooting unarmed black people” thing, but honestly, that’s a whole separate issue.

And yet we give cops billions of dollars a year in budgets on top of what they make for themselves by shaking people down for minor traffic infractions. We give them military-grade gear, which they only use for, well, shooting unarmed black people but I already said that’s a whole separate issue, and certainly not for quelling the awful riots that happen when white people drink at local pumpkin festivals, or if their team wins, or if their team loses, or if some team somewhere plays a game and nobody plays their favorite Kid Rock song during halftime. (No link, but you know that shit has happened at least once in America.)

Nobody questions the idea that this should all be funded by taxpayers. But let me submit to you another idea.

What if, instead of paying for private health insurance, we paid for cop insurance?

What if we simply paid for cops to show up when we needed one, the way we (or our legally required healthcare insurer, thanks Obama) are expected to pay for a doctor when we need one? Call a cop, get a bill, hand it off to your Policecare Provider Network. We can have different tiers of cops, like we do healthcare providers. Got a good job? You get TopCops™ showing up at your door. Not so good? You get DaFuzz™, a wholly owned subsidiary of Walmart.

I know. You have objections. I can hear them in my head along with the demon voices. Luckily, I have clever rebuttals to all the imaginary arguments that I invented myself.

The idea of privatizing police is ludicrous! Any more ludicrous than the idea of privatizing healthcare, when you really think about it? Or is it merely an accident of history and economic evolution that we assume the one is a sacred right and the other one some kind of luxury?

But how would this work? You want a cop, you call a cop. They bill you when they’re done, more or less depending on the services rendered. They roust a homeless dude you want rousted? A hundred bucks. They investigate your mom’s murder? A hundred grand. That’s what it costs the taxpayer anyway; all we’re really doing here is keeping the burden off of people who can, y’know, keep their moms from getting murdered. Which is pretty easy, if you think about it, or else everybody’s mom would get murdered. (Nobody’s murdered my mom yet, knock on wood.)

This also has a lovely side effect, by the way: it makes people more hesitant to call the police if they know it’s gonna cost them personally. This can be a good thing.

For example, let’s say you’re a resident of North Miami, Florida, and you look out your window and see a man sitting in the street with an object in his hand. Now, with our current socialist police setup, you’ll just call the police all willy-nilly with a story about a suicidal man threatening people with a gun.

But if you know you’re going to get a bill for $500 if you actually make the cops show up, you might hesitate. You might look closer and discover that in fact, the man on the street is an autistic fellow from a local group home who has wandered out, and that the “gun” in his hand is actually a toy truck. And then you won’t call cops who will then shoot his behavioral therapist as he lies on the ground with his hands up telling them that his patient is harmless and unarmed. Nor will those cops then defend themselves by insisting that instead of shooting the unarmed, prone therapist, they actually meant to shoot the unarmed, sitting, non-verbal young autistic man next to him.

Which is a very, very silly thing for them to say, in terms of pure public relations and not sounding like a bunch of steroid-crazed half-blind complete fuckheads.

But won’t that make people hesitate to call the police in life-threatening situations? Sure. But let me ask you something: each and every day, how many uninsured and underinsured Americans wake up in the middle of the night with chest pains and lie there, waiting to see if it just turns out to be indigestion instead of a heart attack, because if they call an ambulance and go to the hospital they’re going to be liable either way for an obscene bill?

I can name one off the top of my head: me, just a few weeks ago. I lay in my bedroom for three hours before, in my woozy, sleepy and probably oxygen-starved-brainy condition, I remembered that I’d qualified just a couple of weeks earlier for Medicaid. I woke my girlfriend and had her drive me to the ER, where it turned out I was having a coronary. If I’d waited fifteen minutes longer, the doctor told my family as they shoved a catheter into my femoral artery to put a stent in my artery, I would have died.

How much more often does that happen in America than someone hesitating to call the cops and dying because of it, do you think?

But if it costs money to call the cops, won’t that mean that they only show up fast and pay attention to rich people? Won’t that mean that poor people get shitty police service, and have to wait hours for them to show up, and get treated with less respect and have their crimes solved at a lower rate?

Have you literally ever seen America?

But we need cops, we just do! Yep. I’m not doubting that for a second. But we need doctors a whole hell of a lot more. How many doctor’s visits have you ever had in your lifetime? Now, how many times have you called a cop? When you went to the doctor, did they take care of your problem and solve it, sooner or later?

How about the cop?

I’d argue that your average ER doctor actively saves more lives in one shift than most cops do in an entire career. Again, that’s just logistics — the actual number of times that a cop pulls a would-be murderer off of their intended victim or shoots a serial killer as he’s preparing to sneak into a suburban home with a giant knife, or even stops a robber from jacking your Beats headphones out of your bag at Starbucks is pretty small. That’s not the fault of cops. It’s just how the world works.

But who will investigate murders and fraud and theft? We keep the CID budget we’d normally be giving to municipal cops and give it to the state police. If we want to be Communists about it, I mean — I see no reason why I should foot the bill if your accountant rips you off. And my bank investigates identity theft a hell of a lot more diligently than the cops do, it seems.

Maybe we’ll just keep the murder police on the payroll. That seems reasonable. I guess.

Why do you hate/disrespect cops? I don’t! Why, because I think people should pay their salaries out of pocket instead of out of their taxes?

Why do you hate doctors and nurses, then?

This is bullshit and your arguments are ridiculous. No, they’re not — at least, no more ridiculous than your arguments about why we can’t have universal healthcare. My arguments are at least as logical. Your arguments come down to either a) we can’t afford it or b) I don’t want to pay for it. Literally nothing else. At least I’ve got bullet points, fam.

But cops protect us from bad guys! Really? I thought, according to most Americans, based on talk radio call-ins and loud shrieking on Facebook, that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun…and in this glorious country of ours, anybody can have a gun. Why don’t you just cowboy up and quit whining for somebody to save you and get yourself a piece, instead of wasting other people’s tax money? I’ve lived in some of the most crime-ridden parts of America throughout my life; I’ve had groups of armed people point guns at me, and at no point did a cop ever prevent that or save me. (Neither did a gun, but maybe you’re just weak.)

And besides: if we allow private citizens to stand their ground and do all the killing, maybe they’ll actually be held accountable when they fuck up and do it to the wrong person.

But I want cops to protect me and my property, but I don’t care if other people get healthcare, because I’ve got really good insurance. Well, we’ll respectfully agree to disagree, there, and by the way you can go fuck yourself, you selfish, sociopathic piece of walking human dogshit.

* * *

Am I serious about all of this? Yes. No. Maybe. I’m not sure. I honestly think that the way we’ve allocated resources in our society is pretty arbitrary and kind of horrifying — we attach health to one’s employment, which suggests that the only value to human life is one’s labor. Why should one’s right to be protected from crime be any different? Really?

We really need to re-evaluate our priorities as a society. Maybe privatizing the cops isn’t the answer. Hell, it almost certainly isn’t. But we need to seriously think about what our government is for, why we pay our taxes, and what we expect in return for them. And for my money, keeping Americans — citizens of one of the most prosperous and powerful nations that has ever existed on this planet — healthy and alive should be our highest priority. Maybe more than arresting people for absurd reasons and militarizing our police force.

Or, hell, maybe we just replace ’em with drones. After all, Robocop never shot a twelve year old black kid in a park, did he?