Why is healthcare a for-profit thing?

Call me a liberal, or whatever else you want to call me, but I believe that people should not have to go broke because they or their children get sick. Healthcare is a basic need that we are all entitled to, not just the people who can afford to pay for it. Any one of us, at any time, could be blindsided with some catastrophic illness; it could happen to anyone at any time. When this happens, things are stressful enough, people shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not they can afford the treatment they need.

I just do not understand people who think that if someone gets sick and can’t afford it, then it must have been their fault they got sick, and we should just let them die.

I think we need to get the profit motive out of healthcare. It starts with medical school (and all college, for that matter) – people who decide to become doctors shouldn’t have to take on so much debt just to become a doctor. And doctors should make a decent living, but they don’t necessarily have to become rich, just because they are a doctor (and yes, I know that all doctors are not rich). And I know that MRI machines and the like are expensive, but what is being charged for the use of them really does seem out of proportion. The costs should be recoverable, but sometimes it seems that the costs are recovered pretty quickly, but the rates don’t go down.

I believe that we need to go back to a time when healthcare was not meant to make money, and we took care of each other becasue it is the right thing to do, not becasue we could make money from it.

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