why are many american obsessed over maintainign the illusion of choice in healthcare?

[Anomalocaris]

There is no such things as choice when it comes to healthcare unless you  actually want to die. You get sick, heart attack, run over by a truck etc a persons only priority is to get healthcare. You are not buying a car, fridge, furniture or a movie ticket.
Having health insurance that doesn't cover everything means you're choices are whatever the insurance company decides since their ability to make a profit depends on denying coverage and avoiding payouts

Food, water, clothing, shelter, safety and health are the main priority in any circumstances. Freedom and liberty are only a option you can afford to care about when the more important needs are met. If you're too busy taking care of yourself and your loved ones then your not gonna have the luxury to care for anything else

I just don't get the nonsensical opposition to universal healthcare, is it indoctrination? is it stupidity? or a general lack of even the most basic education?

I think you nailed it - it's largely a question of indoctrination, a Cold War holdover.  For decades, USians were taught that social programmes = socialism = communism = totalitarianism.  Therefore, using general revenue to make sure that sick people get healthcare leads more or less directly to jack-booted thugs, gulags and purges.

Opponents of universal health care aren't stupid, they're cruelly calculating.  They've done an outstanding job of pointing up the failures of UHC (and there have been some) while ignoring or misrepresenting the successes and benefits.

Boru

I don’t think it is a cold war holdover.   Rather, it is reversion to a more nature state that would have existed without cold war.


Communism from even before WWII was born out of and focused a light on the consequences of the excesses of capitalism.  It's presence in Soviet Russia made revolutionary changes elsewhere seem both a plausible and potentially desirable alternative to the excess of capitalism.   The fear of such an outcome made American political and establishment more accepting of such public and social programs as would take some wind out of the sails of communist Propaganda.

The weakness of Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the fall of communism in the Soviet Block at the end of the decade gave American capitalism renewed confidence and reduced ots willingness to compromise in order to keep abreast and ahead of the appeal of communism.  What you are seeing is a process of reversion of American capitalism to what it would have evolve towards when unconstrainted by the need to use both carrot as well as stick to tamp down the social appeals of socialism or communism.

social programs =/= socialism =/= communism =/= totalitarianism were the view capitalist elite were willing to accommodate in order to stave off the credible threat of radical left wing revolution.

social programs = socialism = communism = totalitarianism is the view natural to capitalist elite who fear no existential danger from credible threat of radical left revolution.