I live in a predominantly right-leaning area and know a lot of people who are against universal healthcare. I've talked with a lot of them about it, and every single person would be in favor of it if there was a magical guarantee the money would actually be spent properly and not corruptly misallocated. But the track record is so poor, and there is such little transparency, that they have no trust whatsoever. I can hardly fault them. And the left's argument of "give us more money, we promise to get it right this time" is hardly compelling. Obviously, accusing people on the right of being ok with others dying in the street doesn't help matters.

Wait until those same people find out how private health insurance works. It's not fair to hate on public healthcare in a vacuum without comparing it to the horrendous private system we have now. Then it doesn't look very bad, corrupt, or opaque at all.

This is exactly right. Pretty much anytime the government takes anything over or has a new program...it's a shit show from the beginning. See "Cover Oregon" for a waste of a few hundred million dollars...see "Pandemic Unemployment Fraud" for what is probably a hundred billion...see "PPP program" for what is continuously being found as having tons of fraud...see "Oregon Unemployment still programmed in COBOL and can't adjust the waiting period" for non-financial incompetence. If any area in government could run efficiently and we saw evidence of that...it would be a lot easier to convince everyone that things like universal healthcare would be a good idea.

I am not certain the point you are making.

Are you saying you believe that there are no programs in existence, which are government-run, that are not "shit shows" ?

There are some programs out there that are OK, but I think the gist of the problem is you are missing out on free market forces like price discovery, private equity, and are manipulating risk so anything the government touches ends up becoming less efficient and built with different constraints.

Of course, there are times when efficiency is not the thing we’re optimizing for. The Space Program is an example of a pretty great government program; there was no profit or benefit to private space travel in the 1950s and 60s so the government had to subsidize it, but now that we are starting to see private business catch up, the best thing to do is get government out of the way. This is not all that different during the Age of Discovery where kings and queens subsidized trans-oceanic travel.

IMHO government should only exist to fix free market deficiencies (Monopolies, unfair competition, fledgling industries, lack of players). Not to take over a market and try to dictate it from the top down. Ultimately the goal should be that all people make enough of a wage to afford healthcare and let the market handle it. And still have a safety net for those who fall through the cracks, but the safety net should never be the goal.

It's ironic that many of the people I know who have a right leaning politics and a hatred of government waste are also working in sectors that get fat off government waste.

> But the track record is so poor, and there is such little transparency, that they have no trust whatsoever.

The track record of... Medicare? It's one of the most popular programs in government!

What you've done is just aborb spin. It's true that these people don't trust "The Government" to provide health care, because their thought leaders (and peers like you) keep telling them that. But then they go and enroll in Medicare anyway, and it pays for their care, and because nothing breaks and it's never in the news they don't even think about it.

At some point you'd think the truth would break through, but it just doesn't seem to be happening.

Literally every health care system sucks for someone, it's a complicated problem. But everywhere, both within and outside the US, the systems that work BEST are government-run.

There is no alternative to Medicare given the risk profile for the elderly. It has high approval because there is no other option.

It is also not universally accepted- this is only anecdotal, of course, but I had a doctor tell me he didnt accept it because the rates for some procedures worked out to be below the state's hourly minimum wage.

Perhaps a better example would be the VA- government run hospitals and coverage that is perenially in the news for some new corruption or incompetence scandal, and a very very hit or miss reputation.

The point is that Medicare is a solid floor of service that we know works. People with good corporate insurance do better. Everyone else either qualifies for Medicare or they do significantly worse.

Virtually all of the putative working class republicans "opposed to government health care" would be better served by Medicare. Period.

So if we get rid of Medicare, do you think private insurance would step into the gap and the elderly would then have better health care?

Sorry, I thought I was clear that the risk profile of the elderly precluded private insurance as being an option.

The elderly would get better care if more hospitals and doctors accepted it; there are several ways to achieve this with, I suspect, mixed results.

This is a way more difficult conversation to have with a reasonably informed person on the right than you are making it out to be...

The social security fund has been “borrowed from” to fund other programs.

The government is clearly in the pocket of big Parma.

The government uses taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street.

The government allocates subsidies based on lobbying groups.

The IRS specifically targeted right wing groups applying for non profit status.

The list goes on and on.

So people on the right are not keen to give that structure more money and power.

It doesn’t matter how successful you may think Medicare is. The power structure and track record of the entity which would manage universal healthcare is abysmal.

I think there is a way to do it which could make the whole program solid and resilient against abuse but the proposals all come from the left who don’t seem particularly interested in resiliency.

Also, I really really wish we had a good universal healthcare system. Being unemployed and terrified of being injured sucks

>But the track record is poor, and there is such little transparency

What exactly are you talking about? Don’t republicans have a 40+ year strategy of “starve the beast” to purposely make government services worse specifically to build this distrust?

I’ve noticed this as a major driver too. San Francisco has a per capita city+county budget that is almost 2x the typical. Yes every election is “we just need another $300M for this” and “our bond proposal to fund X”. But next year not much changed and they are asking for more again.

Reagan is not 'the right'. He's a member of the Republican party who served 50 years ago. And again, universal health care only saves money if you start with the basis that the government will force private companies to take on customers that can't pay for service, something that is very much not a right wing ideology.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea or a good idea, I'm just saying there is no basis for universal healthcare that doesn't start with 'we need to help people'. Same with social security. Same with many other left wing policies. A lot of the problems around market inefficiency in healthcare are perfectly solvable without helping the poor.

> if you start with the basis that the government will force private companies to take on customers that can't pay for service,

EMTALA already does this and I don’t see a push on the right to repeal EMTALA. Universal healthcare is a more efficient model of what is already happening.

I also don't see a push from republicans to repeal social security. That doesn't mean it isn't a socialist policy.

Here:

https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-the-2005-social-secur...

It wasn't sold as a push to repeal Social Security, because that polls extremely badly, but that's what it was.

Repealing social security has been a wink-wink, nudge-nudge part of the unspoken Republican platform since social security was created.

Are you saying EMTALA (people not left to die on the street) is socialism? I don’t think that meets the definition of socialism.

No, I'm saying something being supported (or at least not repealed) by republicans doesn't make it ideologically right wing. Republicans, like democrats, have a wide variety of beliefs in their platforms, both right and left.