Monday, September 3, 2018

Week of 09/03/2018


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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