Capitalist
Greed Fuels Medicare-For-All
Anyone remember when healthcare wasn’t the biggest and most important
thing in the world?
It used to be simple. You got
sick, you went to the doctor, you’d give them your insurance card and fill out
a form, he’d treat you, you’d pay a small amount of co-pay, and then you’d go
home.
Today, healthcare is a big deal.
It’s a big moneymaker, and your insurance no longer covers even the
basics. Now Big Insurance and Big
Healthcare and Big Pharma have made it into a big, complex, money-grubbing game.
And, yes, I do mean “game”, as in the games they play to get as much
money as they can and to keep as much as they can. It really is all a game to them. It’s a game about what Big Insurance will
cover. It’s a game about what Big Healthcare
and Big Pharma will charge the people. It’s
a game about which doctor and which procedure is “in network” and which isn’t. It’s a game about how much Big Insurance will
gouge clients with ever-rising premiums.
And it’s a game about when Big Insurance will even pay what they agreed
to cover. And all in the name of blind
stinking goddamned profit.
It is a game of sheer greed, and it is a game that is screwing over
millions of Americans. It is driving
people into bankruptcy and into sickness and death.
It wasn’t always this way. It
became this way over the decades this game has been playing.
The problem is that this game of greed is so overwhelmingly powerful that
they are able to thwart any effort to stop it or even fix it.
We’ve tried the way that President Barack Obama put in. The Affordable Care Act. The plan that the liberals pushed through eight
years ago and the one that the GOP still scream bloody murder over and still
try to repeal, dismantle, and openly sabotage at every opportunity. Ironically, this wasn’t even the idea that
Obama and his liberal supporters were pushing for. It wasn’t even what the GOP was complaining
about. No, what the liberals were selling
and what the conservatives were screaming bloody murder over was not what we
got. It was a bait-and-switch. It went from helping people who can’t afford
insurance to forcing everyone to get it.
Obama and the Democrats literally handed Big Insurance and Big Healthcare
and Big Pharma every single American and forced them to pay for their services,
and even that wasn’t enough for them!
They still screamed bloody murder and they still paid for the GOP to
dismantle it! This is how bad their blind
stinking goddamned greed has become!
So now there’s a new idea... something that was suggested but dismissed ten
years ago. Medicare-for-all.
Simply put, we already have Medicaid and Medicare, which were set up for
those who can’t afford healthcare and commercial health insurance. Rather than limiting it only to the elderly
and the extremely poor, we make it for everyone. So instead of having to play games with which
Big Insurance carrier would screw us over the least, there would be just one,
the federal government. Instead of haggling
over which Big Insurance carrier would negotiate better costs for Big
Healthcare and Big Pharma, they’d have to deal with the federal government.
Now I know what you’re going to say... “But, David, that’s a government
program! That’s not libertarian!”
No, it’s not.
But there isn’t really any other way out of this situation short of
full-blown socialist control of the whole healthcare system.
We’ve all heard the lies before.
The fairy tale that says that “business competition” keeps prices
low. The myth that says “we need more business
involvement, not less.” Yeah, how’s that
working out for gas prices? How’s that
working for the airlines? Have people
really forgotten about Marty Shkreli and the rest of the price-gouging pharma lords?
I *wish* that there was a marketplace solution to healthcare, but there
isn’t. Not now. Not with the current mindset of profit being
the end-all-be-all in the universe. The
companies that make up healthcare, including the hospitals and the doctors and
the drug companies and the insurance companies, have placed profit above everything
else, including the very patients they are supposed to help. There is no sense of duty or responsibility
to their business practices. It is all
about the money. That has been made
crystal clear in the past eight years since the Affordable Care Act was passed. It is not about patients. It has nothing to do with making healthcare affordable
for people. It is about the money. It is about the almighty goddamned profits.
Let’s get brutally honest here... the biggest groups pushing us to
something like Medicare-for-all is not the liberals or the media. It is coming from the insurance companies,
the healthcare companies, the doctors, and especially the drug companies. Their greed for money and their lust for
profits have overwhelmed any sense of moral responsibility to the patients or
to the healthcare industry itself. By their
own actions, they are forcing people to buy into the idea of a program like
Medicare-for-all, if not for the out-and-out socialist takeover of the whole
industry.
The Affordable Care Act was the industry’s opportunity to show exactly
what they claim they could do when they had everything they wanted. They had a captive customer base and very
little – if any – oversight on what they could do. If done appropriately, they’d still rake in
billions. But that clearly was not good
enough for them. And because of that,
they are pushing the very people they are bilking into supporting something
that would ultimately hurt their lust for obscene profits.
Medicare-for-all is not a miracle solution. It will still cost trillions, but it would also
be trillions less than what we are paying now.
For-profit supporters had their chance to come up with something
better. They pissed it away in the name
of greed and hyperpartisan politics. This
is the consequence. This is how the game
will end for them.
No, it’s not how it used to be. And
we will probably never get back to those days any time soon.
And the industry only has itself to blame.
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