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FO time for MAGA and red states.
Sadly, they MAGA voters are so misinformed and deluded, that they will honestly blame the democrats for their suffering.
The fundamental problem with the politics of healthcare is that it plays directly into the hands of Randian Objectivism. You have healthy people (the Makers) and sick people (the Takers). And the Objectivist logic of economics is that you want to remove all the Takers from your economy, because otherwise they'll overwhelm your system and turn it into Dystopia.
When we already operate a floundering system that people generally despise, its an easy sell to claim "It's the sick people who are making health care expensive and driving up the cost of care!" What's more, with the outsourcing of our manufacturing base, its easy to forget the real material cost of the other amenities that make life in the imperial core comfortable. Why does a brand new TV cost me $400 but a night in the hospital cost me $4000? Seems like the hospital system is broken, right?
This is a trap I see liberals fall for as quickly as conservatives, which is why big blue states like California and Illinois and Massachusetts and New York also refuse to implement the far more efficient and equitable public health reforms common to countries in Europe with much smaller GDPs.
Baiting residents - MAGA and Liberal alike - into seeing health care as a cost center rather than a value center (or even a loss leader) has lead the entire country to reject practices that the rest of the world has enthusiastically embraced.
Those states do have a lot of benefits for low income families when it comes to healthcare that red states don't offer.
But a big reason they don't do universal healthcare, aside from billions of dollars in insurance and healthcare capital lobbying politicians, is because you need all the neighboring states to also be on board as well. Why would it be beneficial for me to have universal healthcare if I live on the state border and work in another state? If I get hurt and I need to go to the ER in the other state that doesn't have universal healthcare, I'll be super screwed when the bill finally hits. I bring this up because people in the US travel between states quite often.
But aside from that, I'd argue the biggest issue is that even though California and other blue states have large GDPs, they don't usually have much money to spare. The fact that the Federal takes so much money from regular people in addition to State taxes, it wouldn't be feasible to offer universal healthcare without buy-in at the national level.
The simple fact is, the healthcare system is broken. Costs are so high because they've been able to get away with it due to millions of people throwing money into insurance and not needing to use their insurance the majority of time outside of routine appointments. As a result, these companies had billions just sitting around and for-profit hospitals knew this. As such, it's become a greedy race to the bottom.
A typical surgery even 40 years ago would not drastically hurt anyone financially. Yes, technology and medicine has drastically improved, and correct me if I'm wrong, but fixing a basic broken bone hasn't changed much in the last 50+ years. So why does getting a broken leg fixed now cost thousands of dollars when it used to only cost maybe a couple hundred?
Greed, is my conclusion.