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The thing is, when you (as a tax payer) don't have to spend your thousand dollars (in taxes) for public healthcare and "free" higher education, plus all the cost of political procedures that make it happen (it's a lot of money), you earn much more money in general and can afford private healthcare, which gets cheaper, because it's a competetive market, because when you have multiple alternatives and you can always choose a cheaper one and then the other one has to change approach if they want to stay in business.
That's never the case in public healthcare. Because it will exist forever as long as the politicians decide to, no matter how petty, pathetic it is.
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And see, that makes sense and I'd be fine with it if that's how things actually turned out, but for the longest time our healthcare just kept raising in price, like the competitive market was running in reverse, and treatment for things that had been ailing me since I was very young become completely unaffordable by the time I was in highschool, despite the fact the treatment methods hadn't changed at all.
Also, the way that our insurance companies function are so broken that even though the rates may seem really affordable, you find out once you actually receive what your healthcare plan outlines, nothing you actually need covered is covered by the plan. They cover very basic things, and this is talking about a plan that I had at one point that cost me roughly $121 a month, and that was 1 physical per year by a physician that was in-network, and something like 70% of the cost of an emergency procedure... for the first $1500 of the cost. It didn't cover any preventative healthcare, it didn't cover maintinence drugs, it didn't cover any mental health care or dental care, it didn't cover any screenings for stis or cancer, it only covered 6 "specialist" visits, and copays were outrageous. For a year of treatment under this insurance, it actually cost more than I made for that year.
I ended up spending over $5000 on healthcare expenses that year because of problems affecting me that my healthcare refused to cover, and to make things even better, even if a doctor was considered in network, the insurance company had some hidden bullshit where if the doctor in question wasn't a "plus whatever" doctor the insuranec company wouldn't cover any of the cost what-so-ever. This was something only the company could see, the doctor and person under the coverage could not, and you would not be told if they were covered until the doctor put through an invoice. Seriously.
And that was the cheapest option they had, so of course it's not going to be great and that's whatever, but when you looked at the most expensive plan they had? $937 a month for the same exact shit the only difference was they'd pay 70% on the first $5k and you got a whole 4 extra specialists visits per year. That was literally the only difference. If I'm going to pay that much for shit healthcare I'd rather pay that much so everyone has shit health care including myself
I'd like to just be able to either pay a reasonable amount for standard healthcare without all the additional bullshit involved with how American healthcare functions, and I'd like it to be accessible to everyone. Nothing more, nothing less. If that means I pay a little extra per month for it then so be it.
Just like I would like
good higher education to be more readily available to people who wish to persue it because with good education comes advancement. I'm actually torn on how education should be handled, because whether it's competitive or public, it's still bound to devolve into garbage in some way or another. I feel as though allowing for public education paid for with taxes would encourage more people to further their education since it'd be an option, as well as encourage more people to take on teaching as a profession since they wouldn't have to worry nearly as much about the attrocious pay until cuts started being made again.
How education is handled is definitely something I need to sit on and consider longer, but I'm unhappy with the current state of our education, so I'm willing to hear everyone out on their proposals for how education should be handled. Healthcare, I'm pretty cemented in what I'd like out of it, on the other hand.
tl;dr: Lots of anecdotal garbage about the current American healthcare system and how I don't necessarily disagree with you but I don't fully agree with you either because I haven't observed how well everything works I've only heard theories and third party statements on the matter