I don't really disagree with any of that, it just fucking sucks. Everything went lose-lose about the time it became clear that we're facing our semi-regular centennial pandemic.

Let's explore another angle.

OK, so you and your fam pool everyone’s $2k's into a pot. Let's say there are three generations, gran and gramps, mom and pop, and their two kids. $12k. If either gran or gramps requires hospitalization for a few days, you're fucked. Your $12k is like 10% of the hospital bill.

Obviously, there is still a major problem with guaranteeing that the people who need treatment will receive it and then not be in the red by at least several tens of thousands of USD.

Who is picking up the difference? I don't think the doctors and nurses will wanna work pro bono, and I really, really don't think ol' gramps is gonna pay off his $100k debt within his lifetime. Are mom and pop saddled with the debt? What're the interest rates? Can the two kids also inherit the debt after mom and pop die of despair?

Spending the better part of $850 billion to give everyone $2k is stupid when we suddenly find several hundreds of billions that could be used to seed a universal healthcare system in this moment of necessity.

Or maybe not? In 2018, the annual revenue of the U.S. healthcare sector was about $715 billion. We'd break the bank in one year without some massive restructuring and raising taxes quite a bit. I think I'm for it.

But I'm not optimistic. As if it needed to be directly stated.