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The people of America have an important business decision to make. Right now, we’re paying roughly $2.4 Trillion per year for medical products and services. It is said that we could save roughly $450 – $600 billion of that per year if we eliminated the private for profit health insurance system and replaced it with a Medicare for All insurance system funded by taxes.
Now my simple question is this: What social value in addition to the funding of health care providers, which can also be performed by Medicare for All, is produced by the private health insurance system that is worth $450 – $600 billion per year?
I think the answer to this question is clear. There is no positive social value. However, there is plenty of negative social value in the form of needless deaths, bankruptcies, insecurities, divorces, homelessness, increased inequality, distorted politics, lack of freedom to quit jobs and move to other jobs or start one’s own business, and many other negative consequences. So why are we agreeing to maintain and proposing even to expand this system through mandates and subsidies?
None of this political backing and filing Congress is going through now makes business sense. The Baucus bill is a travesty, and all the other committee bills offered by the Congress are inadequacies. They are all, relatively speaking sell-outs for the sake pf preserving the private insurance system. The proper business decision here is to ruthlessly eliminate the private, profit-making health insurance companies. Stop the bleeding as soon as we can. Pass a Medicare for All bill, and implement it for the whole population inside of a year. Over the next 10 years save us all at least $4.5 Trillion and invest that money in re-inventing our economy and re-building our educational system. Any Congressman or Senator who stands in the way of this needs to be defeated in the next election, because he or she is not voting in the real interests of the American people. What else is there to say about this, really?
(Also posted at the Alllifeisproblemsolving blog where there may be more comments)
23 Comments
Letsgetitdone,
Thank you for succinctly stating the Medicare for All/single payer logic!
If we wanted a massive, unending, legally mandated, corporate raid on every citizen and business of this country, we would have formed the “ELECT DICK CHENEY FOR PRESIDENT” coalition.
This healthcare “reform” is mortally dangerous to the nation, both for its citizens and its businesses, and completely UNACCEPTABLE. It abandons any pretense of attempting to solve the real issues the concept of “reform” was supposed to address. Operating cost savings (costs are actually increased by further complicating an already unweildly “system”), cost limits to individuals (not in the bills), universal comprehensive coverage (tiers of coverage, starting with “junk” insurance as basic level required coverage), helping our businesses to compete globally ( actually increases their responsibilities instead), portability (not in the bills, actually ties you to your employer based coverage).
I want single payer like all the grown-up countries have and nothing less!
Pay Attention. Stop fighting for the mandatory “privledge” of paying Big Insurance en masse and “hoping” for a “public option”. Call your representative and tell him/her you support the HR676 single payer amendment.
Oh, one thing I can add to the benefits of single payer is with single payer you can have any doctor you choose because every doctor in America would be a participant.
Have a nice evening,
Tracie
Hi Tracie,
Thank you for your excellent comment, with which I entirely agree. You said:
I’m going to blog emphasizing that later today in the context of the idea of real “Health Care Choice.”
Yes, Lets, you say it so well. 20% of doctors want single payer and are saying it still. 80% including them want a strong public option and I”ll bet would embrace single payer instead of the monstrosity being assembled. Look at the travesty. Kucinich says we will now provide the corporations with 30 billion new mandatory customers whether they can afford it or not. Trojan Horse it turns out for the corps.
Medicare for all vs. Bankruptcy for all is the choice. I think we should present it exactly that way, what do you think?
lib
Hi lib, I always enjoy your great comments and also your great posts which I’ve missed a bit this week. Am looking forward to the next one. I think Medicare for All or Bankruptcy for All is a great title for a great post, and a great way to put things. I look forward to seeing it on signs all over the country.
Btw, I’m afraid that Obama himself has been mostly a trojan horse for the big corps. Some Democrat!
This morning Dylan Ratigan, the MSNBC loud mouth who is at least consistent in wanting real competition and actual free markets, even if it takes heavy Government regulation to produce that result, said that Obama has the problem of being seen by people as representative of the “deep left.” I almost fell off my chair laughing on that one. I can’t think of even one “deep left” thing Obama has done since he took office. Such an ignorant comment goes to show the deep ignorance that Americans have about political history and world social movements. Next thing you know Dylan Ratigan will be saying that the incredibly weak and spineless HR 3200 is “the deep leftist” approach to health insurance reform.
lets, yes, I have been doing some one on one communication re 676 and am hungry to post again. Glad you have been manning the fort with others. Thanks for your always validation.
above I typed 30 billion instead of 30 million new customers. Ooops. Gotta watch such a typo.
As for Obama, I wrote a haiku about him:
View from the Left
Tea bag hatred brews –
wanting Obama not to be
what he sadly isn’t.
It is a dangerous situation, the crazy wingnuts on the right taking up all the oxygen and filling the media and stalling us all as deer in the headlights watching them grotesquely torture truth and reality.
I wish Obama were the guy they fear, with the embracing empathy for all citizens and yes aliens, too. For pro-choice people. Not a gamesman who winds up parsing principle so much that he sucks all the passion out of the party, too. Frontman for corporatists. Congress and Pres all so busy trying to create a con-bill that will convince us as citizens it gives us more than it does, as the corporations still rake in their gratuituous profits and benefits on the very lives of Americans.
Thanks lib, Great haiku. We all ought to grab hold of that. The continuing failure to talk up HR 676 among progressive lawmakers is getting me really angry. Don’t they understand that without a movement around HR 676 stalling Baucus or Baucus-variants, there’s no way they’ll get out of conference committee with even a decent PO? We need to get them to defeat any PO-less or weak-PO bill that comes out of committee. Let Obama taste defeat, and then come back at all of them in an election year when blue-dog survival is on the line.
Dear libbyliberal,
Keep up the great efforts of posting your Haiku’s. Art is a great comfort in these troublesome (health care) times.
With admiration from a friend from Holland.
Henk Hadders
(= HealthSustainomics; I don’t even remember, why I used this name in the first place for this discussion-platform), but it must have been rather scary).
As long as Henk has revealed his identity, I’ll reveal that our friend from Holland has had an illustrious career in The Netherlands health care industry. He can tell us exactly how they do it over there.
Henk, this is certainly the “money” comment (but really anti-money, moral comment). Thanks for this consciousness raising. Great point.
Henk and lets, thanks for validation for haiku. :)
I am catching up with what is happening and want to study the comments from Henk and you, lets, above carefully and get back in harness.
But here are a few of my cathartic, for me, anyway, haiku. :)
***
My busy ant work.
The corporate powdered hills
collapse. Dried from greed.
***
Needing illusion,
we trust one cares there on high
job totem. Dream on.
***
Obama end trauma
for hearts struck numb by the
colossally dumb and ruthless.
***
Threat of debt leaves us
and our American dream
“a-frayed” at the seams.
***
Ruling class cronies
gang rape all others. Clearly,
“all men aren’t brothers.”
***
Sky falling down soon.
Avaricious idiots
ruin Earth and Man.
***
Money? Lost at sea.
My “coming in” ship just drifts
beyond horizons.
Have a really wicked poem on Palin. But will hold back.
Now back to health care reform.
lib, Thank You. They’re all just brilliant.
lets, thanks for the inspiration this week! Great job on your posts! :)
Hi, Libbyliberal
In the end the West has to meet the East, bringing Yin and Yan together. Your Haiku’s point a finger to the disturbance(s) which threaten the Western world. The West submits the Moon and the Earth, but the East has lived for thousands of years in the conviction that the most energy is needed to see one’s own self as an illusion.
BTW, the Chinese and Japanese talk for more about their own health, eat good and healthy food and consult their doctor -while still in good health- how to maintain the right balance in life.
Whatever happened to Western mankind, …..we really do need an Eastern Renaissance. We need a new synthesis and new worldview, we need to move from ME and US, to …ALL OF US. I really hope my grandchildren will see that happen.
Henk, yes. We need a humanist paradigm shift. :) thanks.
Yes, it would be a sound decision from a financial bottom line perspective, and yes there is no added positive social value in the present insurance system. Health insurance companies operate on the insurance market selling insurance policies to business companies or private individuals (the insured) and on the health care market they select and contract health care providers. Insurance prices determine the behavior of the insured, searching, changing and ending the relationship, at least that’s the vision behind it.
The operations of health insurance companies on the insurance market deplete the stock of human and social capital needed for the well-being of the population (and their next generations), as you so well described. BTW, is there any information about the friction costs in this market, how many policy holders shift yearly and how many dollars are transferred each year? All this also reduces incentives to invest in future health, it leads to a poor quality health care system with poor health-outcomes and no investments in prevention. Why should an insurance company invest is prevention to keep their insured healthy with the chance that they leave for the competition (in good health). It is clear to me that we can speak of unhealthy (and unsustainable) insurance. We have to move from financial to sustainable performance. We need an insurance system with institutions who really care about our health and with whom we build a lasting relationship based on trust, fair prices and quality. Who wants to study the “exchange” insurance rates every week to shift to another insurer once again?
The social impacts of insurance companies’ operations in the health care market are poor as well. What is the role an insurance company -as a corporate citizen- plays or has to play in civil society to solve these problems? It should advocate for sustainable health care, creating health and well-being for patients, doctors and nurses, the community and the environment. Of course, hospitals need to treat sick people and invest in human capital, that’s their primary mission, although they often deplete human capital due to medical errors. What we badly need is “sustainable contracting”, a new normative vision in which the social and ecological outcomes and reputation of health care providers also play an important role in the contracting process to become a preferred provider. We need funding institutions that contribute to this transformation of health care and medicine into sustainable health care and medicine, institutions that realize public and environmental health prevention programs and cooperate closely with other sectors and local communities to invest in human, social and natural capital needed for our common well-being.. Profit seeking motives alone can no longer be the basis for a sustainable 21st century health care. America, “bowling alone” and “caring alone”; what a sad and lonely place it seems to become.
Thanks Henk, for your deeply felt and very well-written views. I think these comments make up the core of a very good post that I encourage you to write. You said:
I’m sure that information is out there somewhere, but I’ve never seen it, and I think it’s important enough for us to look for it. I really like your emphasis on sustainability in health care and the failure of the present system to accomplish that, and I think that the last sentence in the above paragraph is a critical point of criticism of designs for health insurance reform that emphasize increasing competition as some sort of answer to health insurance reform. Why would anyone want to shop around for a better insurer? All any of us want is for the insurer to pay the bills. Who cares if the name of the bill payer is Anthem/BCBS or Medicare, so long as the bill is paid?. If Medicare pays the bill with an overhead rate of 2.5% without a need to shop around at all, and private insurers pays it with an overhead + profit rate of 30% with talk of going up to 35%, why would any sane person prefer to shop around among private insurers in a system that might at best drive down the overhead + profit rate by 5 or 10?.
As they say in the funnies, fuhgeddaboudit! (Did I spell that OK?)
Thanks Joe for your reaction, as you never fail to respond to your commentators. For me you are a safe haven of decency and respect in this fast moving world (of words). I’ve never kept a diary, but I will think about your suggestion to write a diary-post on Firedog Lake myself about these issues.
Henk, I’ll look forward to seeing it, and thanks for the very kind words.
You want a reason to keep insurance companies in business? How about to maintain millions in campaign contributions to corrupt politicians? That, to most in Congress, is by far more compelling than keeping the poor and sick alive. Seriously.
Hi DD09, That is really a serious reason, and I take it seriously. And I also think that we need to keep pushing the advantages of Medicare for All, until the reality of that becomes so transparent that everyone will be able to see that from the viewpoint of many Congresspersons and Senators, the most important value-added produced by the health insurance industry is the funding it provides for them; or from our point of view, the negative value of further corruption of our democracy.
Exactly. Health insurance is a financial instrument, not health care. The best financial instrument in our arsenal to finance health care is the federal government.
masslib, ubetcha!
Logically, single payer totally demolishes any other argument. The fact that we are even having a debate shows how far gone we are.
Medicare for All has been the best solution for us since we started talking about it seriously in the 1970s. Yet we’ve had debates about it in the early 70s at the beginning of the Carter Administration, and again during the Clinton Administration when the judgment was made by the Clintons that Medicare for All was off the table.
I agree that we have moved far from the model of a functioning democracy and are now firmly of the road to a plutocracy, but I also think that the political course we’ve followed in health care reform is not so very different from what we’ve seen in earlier times when we were not so “far gone.” One of the things that’s really different now is the extent to which so many legislators seem to have been bought by campaign contribution and are so bare-faced about it. They constantly try to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge by telling us that these contributions don’t influence their votes. It’s really the ultimate insult.