I listened to a conversation today about why people don’t have good healthcare. Each person had a different view.

I had healthcare until Obamacare came along.

I didn’t have healthcare until Obamacare came along.

My healthcare has never been affordable until now.

My healthcare became unaffordable once Obamacare was introduced.

All of these things are true and all of them are false. Each exists because of a host of conditions: healthcare providers, exchanges, hospital costs, pharmaceutical companies, federal funding, state participation in the programs. Each of these variables changed for each person, each location, each state, each fund, and two dozen other variables.

The truth is exceedingly simple. As long as profit is the goal, there will never be truly affordable healthcare in this nation. No insurance company wants to pay out. Never. They want to keep you giving them your money so they can invest it and make money on the stock market.

And its never going to change. The numbers bear this out.

One-quarter of privately insured working-age adults have high health care cost burdens relative to their incomes in 2015, according to the Commonwealth Fund Health Care Affordability Index, a comprehensive measure of consumer health care costs. This figure, which is based on a nationally representative sample of people with private insurance who are mainly covered by employer plans, is statistically unchanged from 2014. When looking specifically at adults with low incomes, more than half have high cost burdens. In addition, when privately insured adults were asked how they rated their affordability, greater shares reported their premiums and deductible costs were difficult or impossible to afford than the Index would suggest. Health plan deductibles and copayments had negative effects on many people’s willingness to get needed health care or fill prescriptions. In addition, many consumers are confused about which services are free to them and which count toward their deductible. How High Is America’s Health Care Cost Burden?

The Unvarnished Truth

As long as insurance companies can put people in office through their campaign contributions, as long as politicians can lie to their constituents about how much they care, as long as people in power have the ability to avoid participating in our society through fair applications of taxation and infrastructure support, we will have the society we live in.

It will remain unfair to everyone except the rich who can pay for whatever they want to have at the expense of the Commons. They will have the best food, best water, cleanest environments while the rest of us wallow in filth for as long as we don’t revolt against them to create parity or a biological event such as plague doesn’t balance the score as it has in the past.

No civilization which has ever existed before today has ever balanced the scales when economic disparity reached dangerous proportions. Those societies fell through war, through disease, or through external unexpected forces.