Socialized health care or bust.

It should all be free.

Whether it’s removing a bullet from your arm, fixing a chipped tooth, treating your child’s myopia, seeing a therapist, curing a kidney infection or getting a sex change, it should be free.

People are the greatest asset of any civilization. By investing in our people, we elevate our civilization. Human bodies require maintenance, and even improvements.

A society composed of people with high-functioning bodies experiences cultural benefits. Being healthy enables people to get more done in less time, creating an invaluable opportunity to engage in cultural and intellectual activities.

Socialized healthcare is cheaper than privatized healthcare. A fundamental aspect of Capitalism is that price of a good or service is determine not by their cost, but by its demand which, for the most part, is a consequence of the value that it has to people. The value of a service like healthcare is incredibly high.

If you, or your child, needs a life-saving operation or medicine, it is likely that you would pay anything for that operation. Considering that surgery is a skill that is quite uncommon and difficult/costly to maintain, you don’t really have many options as far as who to purchase this operation from. So, basically, you pay up or you die.

There are a lot of moving parts in the current health care system — insurance companies, medical suppliers, hospitals, doctors, employers, medicine patent holders, and so on. To try and explain how each part interacts with the whole isn’t my goal here.

The fundamental issue you need to recognize is that the value of receiving healthcare is incredibly high, and medical care providers are in low supply, and that a privatized healthcare system likes it that way. As you can imagine, this situation creates a fuck ton of profit for them.

Doctors, nurses, technicians and support staff would continue to be paid well. Bypassing unnecessary middlemen such as insurance companies saves society money. Since the goals of healthcare would shift from making profit, more medical staff and practitioners can be employed.

The nature of healthcare is such that the State can be quite effective in organizing and regulating medical care. Figuring out how many and what kinds of staff a government hospital should be possible to figure out via calculation and projections. For the most part, one needs to know how many people there are in the hospitals vicinity, and how often they get sick.

State-run hospitals wouldn’t be perfect, but I think they can be pretty good. Even if they are inefficient, waiting in line and getting bread is better than starving. Notwithstanding, patients with access to transportation can easily distribute themselves to other hospitals. With the barriers of HMOs and Provider groups and all the confusion that comes with them gone, you can easily see the doctor down the street, or in the next town, or in the next state, wherever you go.

Maybe you don’t like waiting in line? Well, suck it up. Even if you have cream of the crop PPO insurance and you live in the richest area code around, you probably wait in line anyway. Notwithstanding, the wealthy can still choose to see private practitioners.

But what if it costs a ton?

If you’re still reading at this point, and you’re not convinced, consider this: not giving our citizens would cost us far more.

“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”

— Your high school Economics teacher

Humanity’s industrial revolution created a ton of value for us in the short to mid-term, sure. But we will pay through the fucking nose for it in the long term, with regards to Global Warming and the general damage to the collective human psyche.

Our eldest citizens (i.e., “old people”) don’t need or want Medicare; they need Medical Care.

Imagine if we devoted our Medicare budget to actual medical infrastructure that was owned by the people and existed for the existed purpose of benefiting them? It’s more efficient and more dignified. Otherwise, we’re essentially allowing healthcare corporations to rob our eldest citizens.

This is not about ideology; this is about pragmatism.