If everyone had access to healthcare the net benefit of treating the mental illness and other disabilities holding them back would easily cover the cost of the healthcare itself.
As someone in the final stages of a masters degree in healthcare management and economics:
Almost. It doesn’t entirely cover the costs (at least from the data we have available worldwide, which is somewhat insufficient) but a focus on mental health(which always includes workers rights, women’s rights and a few more social issues that create long term health problems on a massive scale) and prophylaxis in general is FAR cheaper than what most industrial nations currently do.
We do have a few issues that are not addressed in these concepts (e.g. end of life care and costs associated with that, new types of personalised medication, accessibility in rural areas,etc.) that still make a healthcare system like that something society has to pay for…But it does improve things massively, especially the quality of life of people that are not the actual patients.
I bet the benefit of free school lunches would also pay for itself. And there’s been studies that show that funding early childhood education has a huge ROI.
Same thing with crime and basic needs. It costs less to give people housing, food, etc, than to staff the police and infrastructure for jails. Once you realize that, you realize it’s not about the cost. It’s about the cruelty.
TBH the bigger problem is, even if we did have full funding, we just don’t have the necessary amount of trained physicians. There would still be a backlog.
Not having preventive health care if like having a car, hear it make too many strange noises and not fixing it until it breaks and you end up on the side of the road upside down. You “didn’t spend money” in minor fixings but you end up paying a lot more.
We have health care in Canada yet still lots of street homeless people. They aren’t getting adequate care at all, yet the cost of caring for them exceeds the average person by many times. Many of them are on a first name basis with all the paramedics and other first responders due to how often they’re taken to the emergency room.
Ok, but, I never said universal healthcare would solve homelessness. In America we have the same cost except we’ve made it illegal to be homeless and pay to keep them in prison.
Unfortunately the Conservative groups in this country want us to have a fully privatised system. They’re already working to rid the country of mentally ill people, disabled people or anyone who could be a “drain”. There’s so much rhetoric at the moment about mentally ill people or those with ADHD and Autism receiving benefits I’m actually scared, they’ve made sure that the waitlist for therapy is a year long. I was forced to go private for my therapy or wait “up to 36 months”. I was suicidal and my mum couldn’t risk us waiting, so she sold half of our land to a builder to pay for it :/
I’m just speaking from personal experience. If I was given adequate health care 20 years earlier there is no telling how different my life may have been. Instead I had to achieve impossible feats to get insurance which then made those seemingly impossible things trivial.
Its so weird living in a country where healthcare is a right, and seeing how E everyone in USA is against public healthcare until their insurance stops covering expenses.
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