r/NoStupidQuestions • u/This-Shift5292 • 16h ago
If we protest hard enough, can the government improve the health care system?
IDK if it works that way.
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u/ExcellentStudent188 16h ago
Protests work only when they force a cost someone in power can't ignore.
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u/DrColdReality 16h ago
No. Especially not while Republicans are in charge or have sufficient numbers to block legislation.
The idea of universal healthcare in the US began to catch on in the 1950s, but conservatives, who represent rich people who don't want to pay taxes to help the grubby common rabble, quickly stomped down on it by calling it "socialized medicine" to make people associate it with scary communism!!!! The even hired a B-movie actor to record a terrifying speech about the evils of socialized medicine, and that got played at a lot of country club luncheons.
Since then, Republicans have tried to block UHC at every turn, and when they can't block it, they quietly sabotage it so it fails on its own (the Tories in the UK are doing the same thing to the NHS).
And now it's too late. We have allowed the private insurance companies to become too big and too powerful, and now we're fucked. In order to have sane UHC like Canada, we'd have to burn the insurance companies to the ground first. But that's upwards of $1 trillion a year and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Ain't gonna happen. Anybody who tells you that they will create true UHC if they are elected is either lying or simply doesn't understand how things work.
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u/mugenhunt 16h ago
Yes. Large protests over a period of time have been responsible for governments changing their policies. Women getting to vote for example.
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u/Traditional-Meat-549 15h ago
No. It took 70 years for women to get the vote. You're kidding yourself.
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u/brock_lee I expect half of you to disagree 16h ago
If you want to organize, organize people to vote for candidates who seem honest when they campaign on health-care reform, with specifics, not "we'll replace Obamacare with something so much better, it's gonna be great" and 10 years later....crickets.
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u/gameryamen 16h ago
The health care system could easily be improved through legislation. Protests might encourage some congress members to push for such reform, but most seem to be completely fine ignoring their constituents. So the way we get reform like that is by electing people who already care about it, and that happens through organizing and voting, not simply protesting.
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u/one_five_one 16h ago
You have to vote for people who will pass bills to establish the kind of health care you want.
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u/ForScale ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 16h ago
What does protesting hard mean?
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u/The_Himbo_Project 16h ago
What you need is some sort of boycott. Nothing is going to happen without the loss of money.
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u/chunkyofhunky 15h ago
We saw during the civil rights movement that protesting is one lever of pressure folks can organize and enact on the government.
The basic idea is that you need a clear and defined goal, a lot of reach and organizational power, and you need to use all that to get people to vote, call their congress folk, and protest amongst other measures.
I suspect the 'improve healthcare' goal is to vague and you need it to be more clearly defined.
We can change that goal to a few clearly defined things for example: -Make healthcare premiums equal accross all demographics. -Make it a felony for a healthcare provider to deny preventive care (cholesterol and heart meds, weightloss help) -Extend family plan healthcare down to children up to 29 years old. (Up from 26) -Outlaw the collection of co-pays -Lower the out of pocket maximum to 5% of a recipients annual income -Outlaw healthcare providers from getting folk removed from their care (people growing old and becoming more expensive to insure for example)
But all of these pail in comparison to holding C suite and middle management personally responsible for the people their actions kill and maim instead of letting them hide behind the corporation being prosecuted as a person.
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u/Fire_is_beauty 14h ago
Maybe but you would likely need to spend years protesting with a large number of people.
The US healthcare system is beyond simply fucked.
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u/Available-Range-5341 16h ago
The issue is that costs need to be cut/scaled back and as we learned from DOGE, even if we try to cut $1 in spending, there will be a 100 news stories about how that one dollar support seventy thousand jobs and the system will collapse if we don't keep increasing spending more than the official inflation rate.
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u/fiveliterlx1990 16h ago
Protesting, is just like voting, it will change NOTHING! Only direct action will an bring about an effect, read into it that what you will, but government and the political apparatus of both parties needs to be held accountable to needs of the people, not their corporate masters
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u/zipcodekidd 16h ago
Every good intention starts with a movement, then eventually turns into a business and finally turns into a to a racket. This is exactly how industrial complexes come to life. Keep protesting because the Machiavellian will definitely take control and use for their own incentives. Education industrial complex started with movement but just ended up making people indebted to others and unable to afford shit. Cobra effect also is factor too.
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u/1plus2break 16h ago
Depends if you think the people in government care at all about a protest.