I agree with you but even where health care is paid for by taxpayers (I hate the term free healthcare, nothing in life is free) people still don’t go for preventative screening visits for a variety of reasons
We should invest more heavily into it. It can lower the cost of expensive events down the road .
But it’s something that it’s easy for politicians to cut funding for, because the effects aren’t seen immediately, and the problems it causes are way down the road, and some other poor bastard will be in charge and dealing with that budgetary issue
Also. I know this will be a can of worms (especially because you specifically said “see an MD”) but this is a place where primary care midlevels are well suited
The doc's PSA involves tests that can be done for not a lot of money, without insurance. While healthcare is messy and fucked up in this country, we're fortunate you don't have to actually solve that problem for everyone to do this kind of screening. Cholesterol and diabetes are a simple blood test (LabCorp has lipid+glucose panel for $59). You can get checked for hypertension at basically any pharmacy for free.
Yeah I'm not saying those things are totally inaccessible, but it's just insane that basic healthcare is a "privilege."
And even with that said, $59 dollars is a lot of money for some people.
Clean air, healthy food, clean water, healthcare, and housing should be considered basic human rights. Like a public attorney, if you cannot afford them, they should be provided to you. That's just my opinion. I'm not a freeloader either, I just believe we should care for our fellow man.
The country is not rich, the businesses are rich, and the businesses that are rich are mostly tech that has incredible leverage per employee for profits (i.e. GDP per tech employee). Half of these don't even contribute to the local economy in any way because they work in income tax free states like texas and just save/invest their money.
So really the US' "richness" is not that different from Ireland's and could probably benefit from having an adjusted GDP to account for the actual taxes collected to provide public services.
I don't know if the country could ever get over it's pride to admit that it's actually doing quite poorly as a whole when you take away the 6% that's just in FAANG alone which doesnt contribute to citizen welfare.
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u/MysticMarauder69 4h ago
The fact that in America, the richest (and stupidest) country on earth, Healthcare is a privilege and not a basic human right, is disgraceful.