So, part of the problem with the USA trying to get universal healthcare?

…is that far too high a percentage of our population is completely convinced that we already have universal healthcare.

Including people who have enough connections to our actual healthcare system that they really, really should know better.

ok– lemme explain what I mean.

I have worked in pharmacies where I heard my actual coworkers saying, with complete confidence, that “no one ever dies from lack of access to healthcare,” because “doctors have to treat you no matter what." 

…Leaving me with my mouth just opening and closing like a beached fish, trying to find a way to express the concept of "Hippocratic Oath is not law” and “‘First Do No Harm AND Do Not Allow Harm Through Inaction’ is for Asimovean robots, not doctors, and is also literally impossible for anyone in this trolley-problem world" 

and, of course, "you know perfectly well that the way a doctor treats you is by prescribing medicine. and the way you get medicine is by going to a pharmacy. and when people come to the pharmacy with no money and no insurance, they do not get the meds. You have SEEN THIS”

….But I’m pretty sure none of this would get through.

Because some people in this country have so much…. inexplicable faith in The System, they simply cannot see the glaring evidence.

Or maybe they just see the exceptions… they’ve seen or heard of some instances, perhaps, where someone received state-funded or charity-funded help with something.

And, through their rose-colored lenses, they somehow mistake those very exceptions for exceptionless rules. 

Somehow they extrapolate, from these little anecdotes, to an all-encompassing assumption that such help is easily available to ABSOLUTELY EVERY person who needs it, plus lots of others who don’t need it and are supposedly tricking the system just out of laziness.

And so they end up believing, and stating with smug certainty, that if someone gets turned away, it’s because some trustworthy authority, somewhere, has determined that they don’t really need the help. 

I see this in patients, too. People who come to the pharmacy for a med pickup, with every possible thing stacked against them – prescription for a rare medicine that’s out of stock or not covered by their insurance, or one of the weird insurance rejections that there might be a way to resolve but we’ve never actually seen it before, or a controlled substance with strict restrictions on when and how we’re even allowed to fill it, or weird directions that we need to clarify with the prescriber, or some combination of the above– at the last moment, hours before their previous fill runs out, and in the middle of the night when we have a skeleton crew of two, instead of the usual complement of different people with different insurance-wrangling skills, and everything else is closed so we can’t even CALL a doctor or another pharmacy or an insurance company. 

And sometimes, these same patients still arrive fully assuming that their med will be filled today – sometimes even expecting that it’s ready for pickup already! 

Because they’ve been lucky before. They have never before been in this situation.

And now that that good luck has run out, they are just utterly shocked that we might not even HAVE a way to get them the medicine.

Because they NEED it! There HAS to be SOME WAY to fill it, right? There can’t possibly be situations where the healthcare system doesn’t have a well-prepared solution to a problem that could result in a person not getting their prescribed medicine that they need!

And it’s in these moments I realize– the stuff that we’re fighting to get, with the hope of universal healthcare?

is stuff that people with this kind of starry-eyed trust in America think we already have.

Now…. maybe that doesn’t mean they think we have universal healthcare. Maybe they assume that “universal” healthcare would be literally universal, literally unlimited… infinite access to as much free medicine as you want, any kind, whether you have any need for it or not! And maybe they’re like, “well, that wouldn’t be a workable scenario… so clearly any reasonable nation must have some system to decide who gets medicine and who doesn’t.”

And then maybe, at that point, they run up against some sort of…. mental block, where they can’t imagine different types of systems for that, or how some could be better or worse than others. 

And they assume, since our country does have a system to decide this, then every part of that system must therefore exist for a good and necessary reason, and every real, serious issue must be well planned for.

….I don’t know. 

But whatever it is, I see that faith get shattered about a hundred times a week.

And… hell, maybe that’s the start of something.

But things are getting worse and worse and worse before they get better.