Kill
Bill: Death To Obamacare!
7 March 2010By Dave Lindorff
I’m with Marcia Angell, editor of the New England
Journal of Medicine. The Obama plan for health care
“reform”, as well as the two versions passed by the
House and the Senate, are all devious disasters that
do nothing to solve the nation’s burgeoning health
care crisis, and in fact, will make it worse.
The only thing to do at this point is to take the
whole stinking pile of paper and put it in the compost
heap. Kill it.
This whole effort was never about reform from the day
last March when the new president called on Congress
to begin deliberations on health care reform. It was
about catering to the wishes of the big players in the
Medical Industrial Complex--the big pharmaceutical
multinationals, the hospital companies, the physicians
and, most of all, the insurance industry. People and
their health care needs had little or nothing to do
with this.
That’s why we’ve ended up with proposals that would do
nothing to control costs, that would force health
young people to buy unregulated, high-cost and
high-profit plans that would be money in the bank for
the insurance industry, and that would finance any
subsidies for the poor by cutting back on benefits for
the only group of Americans who currently have a form
of single-payer insurance--the elderly with their
Medicare.
President Obama began this whole obscene nightmare
with a lie, when he said that even though single-payer
systems clearly work to open access to all and keep
costs down while providing better overall health
results in places like Canada and some European
countries, they cannot be applied in America “because
that would mean starting over from scratch.” He knew
when he said it that this was a lie. America already
has a well-run and successful single-payer healthcare
program in place that is bigger than the entire
Canadian health care system, and that’s Medicare,
which was established in 1965, and which currently
finances the care of 45 million Americans. You just
have to be 65 or disabled to be eligible for it.
As Dr. Angell pointed out on a recent Bill Moyers
Journal segment, the simplest way to solve America’s
health care crisis would be to just start a gradual
expansion of Medicare, say by lowering the age of
coverage to 55, and then 45, and then 35, until
everyone was covered and the insurance industry was
pushed out of the health sector. The right-wing
couldn’t use their scare tactics about a “government
takeover of your medical care,” because the elderly
love Medicare, and besides, far from “inserting a
government bureaucrat between you and your doctor,”
Medicare gives the elderly a freer choice of physician
and treatment than any but the most gold-plated
private insurance executive health care plan.
Obama continued this lie when he claimed, in his last
mention of the issue during his State of the Union
address to Congress, that he and Congress had
considered every idea. In fact, he and Congress have
for the last year, carefully prevented any
consideration of the idea of single-payer, or of
expanding Medicare to cover every American. Bills that
would do that, authored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) in
the House and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the
Senate, were in fact blocked from hearings or votes in
both Houses by Democratic leaders, at the White
House’s urging, while the White House itself barred
single-payer advocates from any of its discussions.
Significantly, although every other modern nation has
some form of health plan that works better than ours,
ranging from Britain's state-run national health to
Canada's single-payer, provincially administered
universal Medicare program and the Swiss private
insurance plan where everyone is offered and required
to buy a state-regulated basic insurance plan that the
insurance industry has to offer on a no-profit basis,
not one of those countries was invited to send its
experts to hearings here to explain how their systems
work.
Instead the president met behind closed doors with the
lobbyists of the various health care industries, to
cut deals with each sector in order to gain their
support for his “reform” plan. It was as if the
Department of Justice had called meetings with the
various crime families of the Cosa Nostra in order to
cut deals before developing a plan to “tackle” the
Mafia.
The plan being proposed to “reform” health
care--actually they long ago stopped calling it health
care reform, acknowledging that this was never even
contemplated, and started instead referring to what it
being contemplated as health insurance reform--is, we
are told, going to cost about $100 billion a year.
That wouldn’t be bad if what we got in return was
universal health care, but we don’t even get that.
Instead we have a measure that will reduce access to
health care for the middle class by taxing benefits
and encouraging higher deductibles, that will force
the poor, the young and the self-employed to buy
terrible, over-priced plans offering minimal coverage,
that will chip away at the coverage provided to the
elderly, and that will ultimately lead to higher costs
for everyone, and that will still leave nearly 20
million people with no coverage. The US currently
devotes 17.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product to
health care, and if this “reform” in any of its guises
is passed, that share of the economy devoted to health
care will quickly rise past 20 percent, with no end in
sight.
This is madness. Expanding Medicare to cover everyone,
as I have written earlier, would actually save
everyone money immediately, and the country as a
whole. Consider that the most expensive consumers of
health care--the elderly--are already in the system.
Adding younger, healthier people to Medicare would
cost incrementally much less. That’s why the Canadians
spend about 9 percent of their GDP on healthcare,
while covering every Canadian, while we spend nearly
twice as much and leave 47 million of our citizens
uninsured and unable to visit a doctor. How could it
be cheaper to add everyone to Medicare? Expanding
Medicare to cover everyone would probably cost
somewhere between $800 billion and $1 trillion a year.
That sounds like a lot of money, until you consider
that we already spend $100 billion a year to care for
veterans through the Veterans Administration, and $400
billion a year to care for the poor through Medicaid.
We also spend $300 billion a year subsidizing
hospitals that have to provide “free” charity care to
the poor who don’t qualify for Medicaid, too. Since
all those people would be covered by Medicare under
Medicare-for-All, that’s $800 billion a year in
current expenditures saved right there.
So even if my higher figure of $1 trillion for adding
everyone to Medicare were correct, we’d only be
talking about an extra $200 billion annual expense.
And that could be covered by increasing the Medicare
tax paid as a payroll deduction. You don’t want to pay
more taxes? Well wait. If you were covered by
Medicare, you and your employer would no longer have
to pay for private insurance, which would mean a
savings to workers of thousands of dollars a year, and
even more to employers who currently pay the majority
of health insurance premiums for employees. The net
savings would be enormous.
Nobody has talked about this.
Universal Medicare would make American companies more
competitive in the global marketplace, where other
companies are not responsible for health care costs of
their workers. It would make Americans wealthier,
because they would no longer be paying for health care
out of their own pockets. It would make everyone more
secure, because they would no longer have to fear
losing access to health care if they lost their job,
and would eliminate most bankrupties, which are
reportedly caused by medical bills.
So we know what needs to be done.
And we know that the current “reforms” on offer don’t
do it.
So Dr. Angell is right. Obamacare needs to die.
There is reason to hope that it will die. Republicans
oppose it, though not for any decent reason. They want
unregulated private insurance and unlimited profits
for health care industries. Ditto some conservative
Democrats, who are also anti-government ideologues
whose wallets are stuffed with health industry swag.
But their reasons for oppposing health bill don’t
matter. All that is needed is for a few progressive
members of the House and Senate to admit that the
health bills being considered are not reform, but the
antithesis of reform, and to also vote against it, and
Obamacare will be dead.
At that point we can start seriously demanding that
the Congress and the President act to bring us real
health reform in the way that really works: expanding
Medicare to cover everyone.
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