Every single hospital, clinic, dispensary, consult, pharmacy, etc will have multiple-squares-long queues of people who has been letting their problems fester for not being able to pay it.
It will become obvious that the medical infraestructure is deficient.
And of course, libs will froth in rage. Chuds too but who cares about them.
I genuinely think this is a legitimate problem lmao. The amount of people who are putting off medical problems because they can't afford to get them treated is actually a REALLY high number.
The first like... DECADE of free healthcare would just be dealing with an enormous backlog. It's kinda scary.
It doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, but it's definitely a problem that needs thinking about and talking about.
Free healthcare would necessitate an enormous investment into health infrastructure. We would need to double or triple the number of hospitals and health workers. But that would create jobs and help poor people not die, so no one's going to do it.
We should have at least a clinic anywhere that has a post office.
The healthcare sector is already 20% of GDP in the US. A significant chunk of the value it produces is pocketed by the owners of pharma, insurance, and hospitals, and administrative bloat, while understaffing and even layoffs of nurses is commonplace. Doctors are extremely skittish to the point that they buy malpractice insurance in case a patient sues them (and they very well might need to just so they can afford the steep cost of future care needed as a consquence of malpractice), and often only accept certain insurance carriers known as preferred providers. Training up medical professionals is also absurdly expensive because of the long time investment (which is unavoidable) and the meteoric rise in the costs of education, which is the result of university owners seeking an additional source of profit.
We have the funding, it's just being fucking wasted on surplus value extraction by some of the worst rent-seekers in America. Not only would we need to invest in improving healthcare infrastructure but we would have to cut out all the leeches and redundant middlemen from the process, including the ones profiting from the higher education bubble. Nationalizing healthcare means abolishing private health insurance and replacing it with single-payer government insurance, nationalizing all the pharma companies and pharmacies, re-examining malpractice liability law, abolishing and cancelling student debt (which would include medical students), and making all postsecondary (including graduate) education government/tax-funded and free at the point of access for all students to lower the cost to society of educating and training medical professionals. Plus some other additional measures I haven't even thought of. This is a clusterfuck of a problem that could easily cripple a smaller nation-state than the US for generations.
Yes, absolutely