All Americans already have access to health care, housing, food and anything else that is sold in the U.S. If you can't afford it, that is a different matter. Like anything else that you may want but can't afford, you'll have to do without, borrow from someone, find charity, or lobby for a law to be passed that will force someone else to pay for what you want.
What I have noticed in my time as a financial counselor is that many of my conservative patients may not believe they are entitled to government money (which is more the opinion of left leaning patients who get very upset when they can't qualify for medicaid or other government health assistance programs), they have an extreme sense of entitlement to charity. I think this comes from the Republican mantra that charity has the ability of picking up their costs. Also, Bush was fond of saying that a hospital can't turn a patient away. Now that's true in some cases, but that doesn't mean we can't charge them for it, which we do. And that's only for emergencies, i.e. you will die right away if you don't get this service. If it's something that, if you go without it, won't kill you now, but will eventually (like not getting a transplant or a needed drug), hospitals absolutely can and do refuse these services.
So for instance, their doctor will want to use a very expensive infusion drug. Their insurance refuses to cover the drug. We tell the patient that they will have to pay us however many thousands of dollars (perhaps reaching into hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars) the drug costs if they want it, unless we can successfully get them some kind of drug assistance through the drug company directly or through some other kind of charitable assistance programs. Sometimes the drug has a really good drug assistance program through the pharmaceutical company and we can get the person what they need. Sometimes they're just getting something that either doesn't have a charity for it, or they don't qualify for that charity.
They are then furious the hospital will not provide the drug for free. They will scream and cry and curse me and ask how I can sleep at night and tell me how horrible we are that we won't give them the drug they need to live. We explain to them that though our hospital offers a lot of financial assistance, it is limited to certain kinds of patients (for instance, those in state). Even for those who qualify, the kind of assistance they can receive from us is often limited. I explain that we are one of the top hospitals in the world, and people come from all over the world to receive services here. That though we are non profit, we are not a free hospital. We could not afford to operate as a free hospital/research center. They tell me things like "well if my insurance won't cover it, that's your problem, not mine."
And then, they will end the conversation with, "This is Obama's fault." Even though Obama has nothing to do with anything and this is the way it's been since we've been a hospital.
I make my own luck. When I was younger, I would buy health insurance in the season that Oahu got large surf. I never had to use it.
Did you know that babies can be born with cancer? It happens, usually some kind of brain cancer like glioma or glioblastoma. Then that baby, if it lives and grows up, has a preexisting condition that will make it either disqualified from getting insurance, or the premiums will be exorbitantly expensive. Or maybe the cancer treatment needed to save its life has severe effects on the baby's cognitive abilities, and when it grows up, it will lack the mental capacity to have the kind of job that has good insurance, or at least pays them enough to buy their own. But hey, I guess it's the baby's fault for not "making it's own luck."
