Insurance premiums are flat. They don’t give a shit about your income. The insurance premium for a minimum wage worker and a billionaire would be the same for a given coverage.

When you make it universal and single payer, the billionaire has to pay more money for the same quality of healthcare compared to the minimum wage worker. Therefore, the billionaire is essentially subsidizing the minimum wage worker’s healthcare.

Now of course, you can argue about the ethics of private property, how the billionaire became a billionaire by wage theft and so on. The point is, within the capitalist system that we have, universal healthcare is still the rich person paying for the poor person’s healthcare. This is the technicality that I’m talking about.

Remember, I support universal single payer healthcare. I am merely talking about technicality here.

To address the emergency room situation, what happens when the person being admitted lacks any sort of insurance? If they can’t cough up money, then they go into debt. Their credit scores get screwed. Life becomes hell.