Dear Conservatives, Sharing GoFundMes Isn’t Going to Solve the Problem.
As much as I appreciate the existence of a website like GoFundMe, where people can ask for financial help with emergencies & other burdens, I’ve recently realized how much a huge majority of GoFundMes relate to medical expenses in one way or another. From car accidents, to sicknesses, to even cancer, GoFundMe is the place to help your friends, family & even strangers when life gets rough, & I’m all for that, & am glad people care about other people, regardless of political ideology.
However! Sharing a GoFundMe isn’t going help everyone. There are tens of thousands of Americans right now who are suffering due to theirs, or other’s medical expenses. Not all of these people will have their GoFundMes succeed, & not all of them will even have GoFundMes at all, so rather than help an individual out with a GoFundMe, why don’t we help ALL Americans by voting for people who support policies that will make it so that these GoFundMes will NEVER need to exist anymore in the first place?
The United States is the only country in the developed world that doesn’t have one form of another of single-payer healthcare. We are the only developed country, that has their citizens suffering financially due to hospital bills or medicine. In fact, medical expenses are the leading cause of bankruptcy in this country. Hundreds of thousands of people are losing everything because of our inability to advance, & this needs to change if you truly care about the well-being of people going through medical problems.
30,000–45,000 Americans die every year on average due to their inability to afford our current privatized healthcare system. It’s normal in this country for adult couples to eat through decades worth of life savings to afford cancer treatment. It’s not even rare in this country for adults with diabetes to pay more for their insulin, than for their rent, leading many people try to ration their insulin & some ending up dead because of it. We are the richest country in the history of the world, & yet we have people committing suicide, in order to save themselves & their family from dealing with the cost of keeping them alive.
Even I have experienced the hardships of our current system first & second hand. My mom nearly lost her house due to a lung disease she had, rendering her unable to work, & stuck to a machine just to breathe. I’ve watched good people I’ve lived with go back into addiction as a coping mechanism for mounting debts & looming bankruptcy in large part due to the disgustingly high prices of insulin (which has tripled in the past 10 years). I’ve watched close friends lose their entire savings & go into debt to pay for their mother’s cancer treatment. I’ve watched my girlfriend’s mom gash her head open after falling & going to sleep on a bloody pillow, because she couldn’t afford the price of going to the hospital & had work in the morning, that she couldn’t afford to take off & for God’s sake I’m only 20!
Thing is, Medicare For All works. The only politicians you’ll find who are viscerally fighting against M4A also coincidentally have money in their pockets from Big Pharma & Insurance Lobbyists, because the facts are simple. M4A is the only moral path, & it is completely achievable. The average household pays $10,000 per year on healthcare, so even with a tax increase of $3,000 for the average person (which was Bernie Sanders’ proposal), it’s a net savings of $7,000 a year due to the removal of copays, premiums & deductibles. Not to mention, your taxes will be directly responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of Americans from stress, bankruptcy, homelessness & even death. If you are opposed to a tax increase even though it will still save the average American money, & will lead to a more moral healthcare system system, that is more focused on caring for American’s health, than for making a profit, then you should really consider rethinking your values. Especially if you begin to care more about the “unfairness” of taxing multi-billionaires much higher to pay for M4A, while they kick back in their 3rd mansion stress free, than for the thousands of people who work for them that are struggling to make ends meet or stay alive due to these same medical expenses.
But, if you’re more worried about America’s debt than American lives, don’t worry, I have that covered too. 22 separate studies from institutions ranging from left-leaning, to libertarian have all unanimously found that M4A will SAVE money over 10 years. How? Well, with a cost of many trillions over 10 years, M4A will not be cheap. However, when we take into account that America pays more for healthcare than any other country in the world, due to the rapacious, money-hungry nature of privatized healthcare, even the Libertarian study finds that “US personal healthcare spending is currently projected to be $3.859 trillion in 2022. Enacting M4A would increase healthcare utilization by covering the previously uninsured, by eliminating cost-sharing for those already insured, & by increasing the range of health services covered. These effects are estimated to add $435 billion to national healthcare spending. The plan would sharply cut payments to providers, subtracting $384 billion, & has also been credited with $61 billion in lowered prescription drug costs. Combining these effects results in projected personal health spending in 2022 of $3.849 trillion, a slight net decrease of $10 billion”
No developed country who has went to a single payer system has ever went back to privatization. Nobody loses freedoms when healthcare isn’t privatized. In fact, you have more freedoms, as you can pick whatever doctor you want, rather than just the ones that are in your insurance’s network. Not only that, but EVERYTHING is covered. Sure you don’t have the “freedom” to choose whether or not you want specific coverage or not, because instead everyone & everything is covered. But firefighters are already socialized in The U.S. & nobody is complaining that they didn’t have the freedom choose to whether or not to pay for their services, because obviously people want the most coverage they can get incase of emergency, so that argument is one of the worst I’ve heard. Freedom is drastically increased under M4A.
The U.K. has had their NHS for almost 100 years, & only does it begin to struggle when its funding is cut, yet even Boris Johnson, who is extremely conservative, would never think of running on ending the NHS, because it’s one of the most popular government agencies in the entire country, even when underfunded & over burdened. Other countries are shocked & disgusted when they hear about how much Americans spend on healthcare, but it doesn’t have to stay this way. We can vote for change, we can put our foot down, & pressure all of our representatives to have our health in mind. Afterall, you can’t have your constitutionally unalienable rights of Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness is you’re dead/dying from the healthcare costs. Please reconsider your stances on this. GoFundMe may help your friend, but M4A helps ALL Americans.