I have long been an advocate for a single-payer, “Medicare for All” system for the simple economic reality that it is the only way people can get decent health care and not go bankrupt. It’s one of the many reasons I support Bernie.
This morning, The New York Times illuminates this with a piece called “Lost Jobs, Houses, Savings: Even Insured Often Face Crushing Medical Debt”. Essentially, the piece tells us what you would know if you actually purchase health care under the Affordable Care Act—it’s too expensive and the prices have gone higher and higher, making it a burden on people. As Bernie often says at every rally, he praises the president for pushing a bill that covers more people BUT he also, then, says, the prices of insurance and drugs are obscene.
We have to kill the insurance industries and the greedy profiteering by the drug cartels (and I’m talking about the cartels named Merck et al).
From the article:
The number of uninsured Americans has fallen by an estimated 15 million since 2013, thanks largely to the Affordable Care Act. But a new survey, the first detailed study of Americans struggling with medical bills, shows that insurance often fails as a safety net. Health plans often require hundreds or thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket payments — sums that can create a cascade of financial troubles for the many households living paycheck to paycheck.
Carrie Cota learned the hard way that health insurance does not guarantee financial security. Ms. Cota, a 56-year-old travel agent from Rosamond, Calif., learned she had the autoimmune disease lupus in 2007. She ran up thousands of dollars in medical and dental bills and ended up losing her job, and eventually her house.
“I had to move in temporarily with my ex-husband,” she said in a recent interview. “I’m staying with him until I can figure out what to do.” [emphasis added]
And:
The Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama in 2010, protected many Americans from very high health costs by requiring insurances plans to be more more comprehensive, but at the same time it allowed or even encouraged increases in deductibles.
“We’re at a point where there’s been slow growth in health care costs and huge improvements in the numbers of people who have health insurance,” said Sara Collins, a vice president at the Commonwealth Fund, a health research group. “But there is this underlying trend towards higher cost sharing that could put increasing numbers of people at risk for being underinsured.” [emphasis added]
And:
Randy Farris, 58, a factory worker from Conger, Minn., needed a knee replacement three years ago. His insurance covered 80 percent of the bill, but he needed to cash in an I.R.A. to pay his $4,000 share. “I haven’t been to the doctor since because I don’t want any more doctor bills,” he said. His wife’s retirement savings had been wiped out years before, he said, when he used them to pay her hospital bills after she died of cancer.
And:
Insured people with financial problems often have plans with higher deductibles. But many said that the smaller co-payments piled up to make their care unaffordable. Many also received big bills that were not covered by their insurance. Among the 32 percent of insured patients stuck with an out-of-network bill, more than than two-thirds of patients said they didn’t know the provider wasn’t covered. More than 25 percent of the insured respondents said a medical claim had been denied.
Medical bill problems rarely occur in a vacuum, the survey found. Most of the people surveyed said their finances were tight even before there was an illness in their family. This pattern held true even for families higher on the income scale. The rates at which people with medical bill problems sought charity or borrowed money from friends was similar among people earning less than $25,000 and those earning more than $100,000.
So, what do we learn from this?
First, the dishonest/fraudulent attack by the status quo candidate (among a long list of fraudulent claims, veering from deception to outright falsehoods) that Bernie’s health care proposal is a tax hike ignores the truth that single-payer, “Medicare for All” reduces by thousands of dollars the costs to every American, and by trillions of dollars over a decade to the economy as a whole. This is just a fact. All the attempts at health care “reform”—including the utter failure of the status quo candidate’s effort back in the 1990s—are doomed to be destructive to average people unless we kill these corrupt industries.
Second, this is just smart economics—and even the “free market” cheerleaders have nowhere to go when you press them. My favorite personal example is from way back before the ACA was even passed. On July 13th 2009, I was doing a "talking head" segment with CNBC's Maria Bartiromo. She had led off the segment by asking whether the health care debate had become "less about economics and more about class warfare", referring to a debate about whether we should hike taxes on upper-income people to help pay for national health care.
Me: "There is class warfare in the country and the working class is losing. But I think the problem with this tax issue is that we don't want to look at the real issue, which is if we actually had a single-payer "Medicare For All" system on the table this wouldn't even be an issue. If you took Model A of the health care system, which is a 25 percent, 30 percent inefficiency in terms of administrative cost, that's the way the health insurance industry works, and the 3 percent administrative cost that Medicare consumes, you basically would save $300 to $400 billion a year if we went for a single payer, "Medicare For All" system..."
After some back and forth, and comments from another guest, we got back to the issue:
Me: "If you had a single-payer system you would not have that burden on businesses...we put this burden on them when we could take that burden off business if we had a single payer system. The economics of it are clear. All we are dealing with really is politics."
Maria: "It makes perfect sense but why aren't we going that way?"
Me: "When President Obama campaigned as candidate Obama he said I'm in favor of a single payer system. He said however we can't start this system from the beginning and so what he really revealed was he was unwilling, as are too many Democrats, to take on a powerful industry, the insurance industry, on behalf of the American people. Sixty percent of the American people favor a single payer system, let's put that on the table now."
Maria: "What you're saying sounds like it is the most sensible but what we really want to do is figure out what is reality, what is going to be in that health care bill at the end of the day that we're all going to deal with."
So, what you can conclude is quite simple: the president, respectfully, and the status quo candidate, have never been willing to confront these powerful industries and give the people what we need: free health care from cradle to grave.
That’s what we mean by a political revolution. If we elect a status quo candidate, the insurance and drug industries will break out the champagne (why do we think the insurance industries spent millions of dollars to support the ACA? Because it gave them millions of new customers to rip off.)
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