Thomas Sowell once said:
"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."
To this list, we should add the threat of single-payer healthcare. A single-payer system, like ranked-choice voting, sounds like a good thing, but since money controls much in medicine, it basically makes the physician subservient to whatever some third-party decides is best. Most people can't see this, and only predict that things will be less expensive. Making care less expensive will come at a cost, but limiting your choices. Fast food is cheaper, but it is not a dietary option for everyday eating. It's been said that in healthcare, the three goals are quality, affordability, and accessibility. But you can only choose two. While this may be a simplification, it is not far from the reality. Single-payer plans offer the affordability and accessibility, but quality requires that you have quality physicians, and the availability to receive care that is sometimes expensive. It also means that you don't want to get bogged down with paperwork and administrative hassles that so often accompanies government-sponsored services. But the most telling reason for wanting to avoid government-regulated single-payer care was revealed by SCOTUS when they ruled in favor of the vaccine mandate for healthcare providers, saying:
The court said that the vaccine mandate for health care workers was, unlike the OSHA regulation, justified as just the kind of detailed regulations that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has long imposed as a condition for health care providers getting federal funds.
How do we go from a world where helping people is cliché to a world where swaths of lawyers are fighting to defend those doing just the opposite? The people who write that they want to help people too much on their applications are the same people three years later working for firms actively fighting for those who have hurt people.