“Universal healthcare” is the misleading virtue signaling slogan that politicians love to use to wield control over healthcare instead of letting the free market and competition work to maximize clinical output and access to care Do the hard work and come up with solutions to increase competition (ie bring back private practice and physician owned hospitals). Screaming “universal healthcare” or else is what the rent seekers did to pass the ACA and the only winners were health insurance companies and big corporate health systems. Healthcare became massively consolidated and expensive and we ended up with the exact opposite of “universal healthcare”

ACA was pushed through by President Obama’s administration by declaring that “healthcare is a right” same talking point used to erroneously support ACA subsidies that only serve to enrich health insurers Leonard Peikoff in 1993 precisely predicted how this would end 🤯 Worth a read 👇 “Take the simplest case: you are born with a moral right to hair care, let us say, provided by a loving government free of charge to all who want or need it. What would happen under such a moral theory? Haircuts are free, like the air we breathe, so some people show up every day for an expensive new styling, the government pays out more and more, barbers revel in their huge new incomes, and the profession starts to grow ravenously, bald men start to come in droves for free hair implantations, a school of fancy, specialized eyebrow pluckers develops--it's all free, the government pays. The dishonest barbers are having a field day, of course--but so are the honest ones; they are working and spending like mad, trying to give every customer his heart's desire, which is a millionaire's worth of special hair care and services--the government starts to scream, the budget is out of control. Suddenly directives erupt: we must limit the number of barbers, we must limit the time spent on haircuts, we must limit the permissible type of hair styles; bureaucrats begin to split hairs about how many hairs a barber should be allowed to split. A new computerized office of records filled with inspectors and red tape shoots up; some barbers, it seems, are still getting too rich, they must be getting more than their fair share of the national hair, so barbers have to start applying for Certificates of Need in order to buy razors, while peer review boards are established to assess every stylist's work, both the dishonest and the overly honest alike, to make sure that no one is too bad or too good or too busy or too unbusy. Etc. In the end, there are lines of wretched customers waiting for their chance to be routinely scalped by bored, hog-tied haircutters some of whom remember dreamily the old days when somehow everything was so much better. Do you think the situation would be improved by having hair-care cooperatives organized by the government?--having them engage in managed competition, managed by the government, in order to buy haircut insurance from companies controlled by the government? If this is what would happen under government-managed hair care, what else can possibly happen--it is already starting to happen--under the idea of health care as a right?” Full essay here: westandfirm.org/Peikoff-01.h…

As a practicing spine surgeon who pours my heart into healing patients every day, let’s be real: Declaring healthcare a “right” isn’t noble—it’s a sneaky way to force doctors like me into servitude. My skills, time, and labor aren’t yours to command. True rights protect freedom, not demand others’ sweat. If healthcare’s a “right,” I don’t own my own hands anymore. Taxpayers lose their earnings, hospitals their property. It’s not care—it’s compulsion. A free society can’t survive treating humans as resources to plunder. Bring back the free market in American healthcare to maximize access to care and undo the ACAs attempts to socialize healthcare in the US!