Not implementing Medicare for All is absurd

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.   

Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed implementing a single-payer style Medicare for All system to replace our completely dysfunctional sick care system. This was denounced by Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan as "absurd."

In 2018, all health care spending is expected to total $3.5 trillion.

By 2026, such spending is expected to skyrocket to $5.7 trillion.

Sanders' plan is projected to cost $32.6 trillion over 10 years, or an average of $3.26 trillion a year.

So Medicare for All would insure far more people than the current system (everyone) for far less money. To not implement such a program is what would be absurd.

Unless you own stock in the private health insurance industry.

How hideously inefficient is our health care system?

How hideously inefficient is our health care system? 

As this graphic from the Wall Street Journal illustrates, over 22% of the taxes you pay goes to health care. 

And most Americans are required to find money on top of this to pay for private insurance (now mandatory, a historic first, under Obamacare) as well as treatment. 

At least if we had Medicare for All, our tax money would be spent in a far more rational and efficient way.

Far right think tanks pushed individual mandate

I read an interesting column today about the Affordable Care Act (referred to by critics as Obamacare). It pointed out that the individual mandate, the heart of Obamacare, was once endorsed by the right-wing think tanks [sic] The American Enterprise Institute and The Heritage Foundation as a way of pre-empting Medicare for All (single payer).

This inconvenient fact illustrates several truths:

1) If far right think tanks endorsed it, then it's a pretty safe bet that the individual mandate is NOT a bridge toward single payer, as Obamacare apologists claim;

2) Democrats are now as far to the right as conservatives used to be;

3) Republicans are now further to the right than Attila the Hun;

4) Serious progressives should have nothing to do with either of them.

But given that ACA apologists seem intent upon 'forgetting' that Obamacare is virtually identical to the plan implemented by his Republican rival, I suspect rationalization and self-deceit will prevent them from realizing #4.

Obamacare: like solving hunger by mandating everyone eat three meals a day

Today, the US Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA), often called by critics ‘Obamacare.’

The simplistic dichotomy peddled by the mainstream media is that if you oppose Republicans/The Tea Party, you support Obamacare. If you oppose Democrats/Pres. Obama, you oppose Obamacare. Everything’s neat, simple and tidy. Anything that varies from that easy narrative is pretty much ignored. Frankly, MSM journalists should have read some of the discussions my friends and I participated in today. A progressive hating on the ACA, a libertarian praising it... the nuance would make their heads explode.

So here I am a progressive who is disappointed that the ACA is still the law of the land.

Obamacare is akin to solving the problem of hunger by mandating everyone eat three meals a day.

In its decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that health insurance (ACA has nothing to do with health care) is the only private commodity that all Americans are required by law to purchase as a condition of citizenship, as a condition of being.

The health insurance industry is surely sending a huge thank you to the corporate Supreme Court, for this greatly expanded and government-mandated (under penalty of fines) pool of buyers for their racket.

This is a huge step backwards for real health care reform. Liberals, who know in their brains that Medicare for All (single payer) is the real solution to the problem of access to affordable health care, will be neutered for at least the next 20 years. They think Obamacare is just fine. People who think the situation is just fine don’t agitate for something better, especially when it’s completely different.

The ACA also pre-empts further efforts real reform because it gives the private health insurance industry even more of an incentive to preserve the status quo at any cost.

This is what passes for ‘choice’ in America. Mitt Romney and the Republicans are running against a health insurance scheme he inspired. Obama and Democrats are defending a health insurance scheme their hated opponent inspired. This pathetic state of affairs illustrates so perfectly why America needs real multipartyism.

Flexible spending accounts: the only health care ‘reform’ we can hope for?

Bob, over at Planet Albany blog, is providing coverage of the New York Conservative 'Party' conference in Colonie, a suburb of Albany. He makes reference to former lieutenant govenror Betsy McCaughey, who made a national name for herself opposing health care reform under Bill Clinton and who is, not surprisingly, dead set against so-called Obamacare.

She said that there are indeed alternatives to Obamacare, blah blah blah... I’ll believe that when the House passes something concrete. Until then, it’s just empty talk. Besides, we know that if the Republicans actually ever passed a health care bill, it would be at least as bad, if not worse, than the Democrats’ awful plan. It would take us further away from the Medicare for All that would be cheaper, more comprehensive and more efficient than the totally dysfunctional system we have now.

It’s clear that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are interested in real health care reform. They merely tweak around the edges, arguing about exactly how to give more power to health insurance bureaucrats and how to expand profits for the private insurance money changers.

Since both corporate parties are only interested in making the tiniest changes possible so they can claim the mantle of 'reform,' here’s one: flexible spending account (FSA) reform.

FSA is where you can put aside a small part of your paycheck tax free to use on medical expenses. But there are several problems with the way FSA is structured.

First, flexible spending accounts are actually quite inflexible. You must decide before the year even starts how much per paycheck to put aside. Once decided, it can not change under any circumstance (except, I believe, the birth of a child or death of a spouse). This is fine if you have access to a crystal ball or are related to a time traveler.

For example, I put aside $260 a year ($10 per biweekly paycheck). That’s plenty to cover an ordinary year’s medical expenses for me: a physical, an eye appointment and glasses or contacts, contact lens solution.

But if I get injured during the year or get diagnosed with an illness or condition or something else happens that I CAN’T PREDICT, what’s left of that $260 is going to disappear in a heartbeat and I will be out of luck. You should be able to increase your FSA contribution during the year to account for unexpected changes in your health condition.

Another major problem with FSA is that it’s use it or lose it. If you don’t use all of the money in your account by the end of the year, it disappears into the pocket of, surprirse surprise, the insurance company. Essentially, this is a system that fines you for being healthy and encourages you to be wasteful.

This can be remedied in one of two ways. Either the balance remaining in your FSA should be refunded to you on Jan. 1 (and thus it becomes taxable) or it should be rolled over so it can be used in the next year. Your money shouldn’t disappear into the insurance racket’s coffers.

What’s worse is that recent inexplicable changes make it so you are unable to use FSA money on legitimate medical expenses like such as aspirin and cough medicine. As of Jan. 1, 2011, you can only use FSA for prescription medications.

Again, this is only tweaking around the edges of our dysfunctional health care system, which critics say can be more accurately described as 'sick care.' But since we can’t expect any more from the RepubliCrats, maybe they’ll take up these changes.

Question for Scott Murphy and Chris Gibson

If I had a question to ask Scott Murphy and Chris Gibson, candidates for Congress in New York's 20th District, it would be this.

As a career soldier, Mr. Gibson has received taxpayer-funded health care for the entireity of his adult life.

Mr. Murphy has also received taxpayer-funded health career since he became a Congressman.

My question is this: if publicly-funded health care is good enough for senior citizens, soldiers and politicians, why isn't it good enough for ordinary Americans?

Americans celebrate 45 years of 'socialized medicine'

Single payer health insurance in America is 45 years old today.

Government-provided, national health insurance for all senior citizens was signed into law on this date in 1965.

We've had four and a half decades of Medicare for some. It's about time for Medicare for all.

Sick of/from lobbying

Facts of the week: "The bill for lobbyists [on the 'health care' issue before Congress], television ads and political donations [sic] has topped $375 million --- or enough to pay the entire insurance tab for about 30,000 families a year,' reports CNN Money. Meanwhile TIME reports there are now 2.3 drug industry lobbyists for every member of Congress." -The Progressive

The public nothing

I am starting to agree with the objections of those who rage at the thought of paying so that someone who needs it can receive health care. I will use that logic to see if I, as a non-driver, can get a rebate on my taxes that subsidize the interstates.

Fining people for being poor is NOT better than nothing

As someone who cares about human beings after they reach the post-fetal state, I'm left to wonder about reaction to what some are calling the HMO bailout by Congressional Democrats.

The so-called health care reform bill that passed the House would add an inadequate but tolerable in the short-term public option. But since the public option is the only part of the bill that would even modestly reform health care access, it's almost guaranteed to be emasculated in the Senate, where the "progressive" party holds a crushing 59-seat majority.

The rest of the bill has some things that would make needed, but small improvements to a badly broken system. These should be passed separately. However, by themselves, they are little more than putting slightly more comfortable deck chairs on the Titanic.

There has been much outrage by liberals and progressives against Democrats who voted against this "reform" bill. But I'm left to wonder if the criticisms are serious on the merit of the bill or simply a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that Republicans and Joe Lieberman hate it.

The bill's most unconscionable provision would levy fines against people who did not have health insurance. Essentially, this provision would punish people for being in difficult economic circumstances. It would fine people for being unable to afford insurance

I can't see how anyone who calls him/herself progressive can possibly support something that would fine people for being poor.

It's not the working class who would benefit from this health care "reform" sham, from being compelled to buy garbage they can't afford. It's the private insurance companies who would see a huge boon in revenues because the government would be forcing people to buy their crap.

Insurance companies have never cured an illness, sutured a wound or repaired a broken bone. They do not provide health care. All they do is shift around money and take their 30 percent cut. How they have this much power is a testament to corporate suffocation of what was once democratic governance.

Opposing this bill on this basis is not, as often derided, letting "the perfect be the enemy of the good." It's not some trifling objection. It's fundamental.

According to Democratic rhetoric, the purpose of the bill is to make health care more accessible and more affordable. Fining people for being poor necessarily makes health care for those people LESS accessible and LESS affordable. And for that reason alone, the bill should be opposed as long as this unconscionable provision is part of it.


Update: According to Wikipedia*: It is estimated that approximately 60 percent of poor Americans are not covered by Medicaid.

(*-the source link doesn't seem to work)

"Socialism" and health insurance

I'm getting increasingly annoyed at hearing people who already receive taxpayer-funded health insurance or care call it "socialism" when it's proposed that everyone else receive the same thing. Basically, they want working Americans to pay, at least in part, for their health care but object to having to reciprocate. I believe something like 70 million Americans receive either Medicare, Medicaid or VA care. If you add that number to everyone who works in the public sector (federal, state and local bureaucrats, prison guards, soldiers, teachers, etc), the number of people who receive taxpayer-funded health insurance or care has to be close to, if not actually, a majority of Americans.

"We Have Talked The Problem To Death" (guest essay)

Editor's note: During the current health care debate, Canada's national health insurance program known as medicare has come under attack from opponents of real reform. The program provides health insurance to all Canadians and does so quite a bit less expensively per capita than our own system. Quite a bit of misinformation and outright lies have been told about the Canadian medicare system. A local businessman, who actually lived in Canada and knows the system first hand, shares his thoughts about how the Canadian system really works.


"We Have Talked The Problem To Death"
by Matt Funiciello

Regarding health insurance reform, Barack Obama was quoted today as saying, "We have talked this problem to death." It's enough to make a reasonably-informed, active citizen run screaming into the woods.

As someone without health insurance, as someone who spent more than a dozen school years living in Canada with its fantastic health care system, and as a small business owner tasked with providing HMO coverage for my fellow employees, I am very upset at this latest betrayal by the Democratic Party and its leadership. If I was a Democrat or if I had voted for Obama, I would be absolutely enraged! He is touting mandatory, overpriced heath insurance in place of meaningful, universal health care reform.

The folks who run the faux-left corporate lobby group known as the Democratic Party are now responsible for all kinds of terrible policies, both foreign and domestic and they simply can't blame Bush anymore. For Obama to now pretend that he and his party care about the 100 million Americans who lack appropriate access to health care transcends the corrupt and enters the realm of the criminal. Lack of access health care kills 22,000 people in this country every year. That’s seven and a half 9/11s! Think about that. Let that sink in for a moment.

I have written about the answer to this problem frequently. I have spoken at rallies in support of what I know to be the right answer. I have supported political candidates who support that answer and would use it to save 22,000 American lives every single year (along with barrels of money).

The "answer" I am referring to is Single-Payer Health Care (Improved Medicare For All - H.R. 676). Every American would be completely covered and it would actually cost less than we are already spending for unconscionably bad, non-universal, heath insurance. There are currently 50 million Americans totally without health insurance but there are also 40-50 million more who are considered "undercovered." Our profit-driven, criminal, health care system is currently ranked 38th in the world.

Canada has a single-payer system and they don’t have any cases of people losing their homes due to medical bills... because there are no medical bills. Progressive taxation pays all the costs.

Canadians don’t build two hospitals ten miles apart from each other in small towns and then wonder why their health care costs are so high. They build and support one hospital and figure out how to most effectively transport patients to said hospital. It' a system based entirely on patient care and efficiency, not on profit.

Canadians live THREE YEARS longer than we do! If their system is so damned terrible (as Fox TV and the NY Times tell us on an almost daily basis), how is it possible that they are healthier than we are? How could their infant mortality rate be almost half what ours is?

In Canada, no one waits 3 hours to have a broken arm looked at nor do they wait ridiculously long periods for necessary surgeries. The insurance companies and the corporate media are LYING TO US. They are LIARS! It's really just that simple. They are keeping as much as 35 cents of every single one of your health care dollars for themselves. If profit margins are a corporation's sole motivation, 35% of the 2 TRILLION dollars spent annually on health care would be a fairly compelling reason to lie, wouldn't it?

There is no profit in Canadian health care. This means that while doctors and nurses make a good living there, they are, by and large, people truly motivated to help their patients, first and foremost. Although their are many doctors who play golf in Canada, I would hazard a guess that very few Canadian doctors go into medicine specifically to support their golf habit. I actually know doctors here for whom golf is the center of their existence rather than the healing arts.

Collectively, Americans spend about $7900 per person per year on health care (private insurance, private bills, Medicare and other subsidized programs). Eliminating all that redundancy and removing profit from the equation allows Canadians to save about $2300 per person while covering EVERY single Canadian. Again, our system leaves about 100 million people in fear that if something goes wrong with a family member's health, they may go bankrupt (and they should be scared because it happens every single day and often to people who think they're more than adequately covered).

I know the popular mythology, oft-repeated, is that Slick Willy (Bill Clinton) and his wife, Hillary, tried "really, really, really hard" to get us real health care back in 1994 but we "just weren’t ready for it as a country."

We really need to stop supporting this kind of nonsensical propaganda. If Bill Clinton had really wanted to pass a national health care plan, he would have done exactly that. He had no more excuse then than Obama has now. To so clearly ignore what a majority of Americans so clearly want is, again, for lack of a better word, criminal.

Clinton had a Democratic congress and the American people behind him and instead of championing the very issue that most likely got him elected, he withdrew from it entirely and left his wife, who had never held a political office, to "fight" for this much-needed change all by her lonesome.

Mrs. Clinton got some great television exposure, playing the role perfectly of proud defender of the people and gaining national attention. Then, just as if everyone inside the beltway knew it was pre-ordained, Congress refused to pass it and it just "went away" for 15 years.

Bill Clinton then went on to do more long-term damage to our economy than, perhaps, any other president in American history. He passed NAFTA, selling our manufacturing base to China, India and Mexico for about twelve dollars and sixty three cents. We will likely never recover and, for this, the Democrats love him and speak nostalgically of the "Clinton era."

Later, when Hillary ran for Senate, she had strangely become the darling of the very same HMOs and the pharmaceutical industry that she had so bravely "fought" earlier on. They supported her campaign with historic levels of donation. Those who refuse to see that the Clintons played us all like a violin are just being willfully ignorant because that's precisely what they did.

The same is true with Barack Obama today. This totally fake progressive (who has far more in common with George Bush Jr. than with JFK) comes to the and says, "We’ve talked this problem to death."

While we may well have talked the "problem"to death, Obama and his ilk have refused to even mention once the "answer" that would resolve the problem instantly.

The insurance companies have invaded Washington in massive numbers, spreading their propaganda like evil seed and infecting our "leaders" with the kind of weak will that only sizable donations can secure. When single-payer advocates arrived at the hearings on health care reform asking why single-payer was not even being discussed, Obama’s idiot henchman, Senator Max Baucus, had them all arrested.

This is "progressive" politics? This is "socialism"? Lets call it "corporatism" instead because that’s exactly what it is. There are few better examples out there of our puppets and puppet-masters at work than our government's absolute insistence, not even discussing the health care answer a clear majority of Americans say they want to see made into policy.

For Obama to say that we’ve "talked it to death" is the worst kind of lie. It is reminiscent to me of Gee Dubya’s "You’re either with us or against us!" rhetoric. It is to suggest that we have exhausted all possibilities and that it is time for action when, in fact, one terrible plan is being sold at the expense of altruism, health and sanity.

Obama’s corporate health care plan will simply force every American to buy bad, overpriced, insurance from the very same weasels who engineered the criminal health care nightmare we currently call "a system." The parallels between this and our bailouts of all of the "financial wizards" who brought us "Depression Part II" are simply astounding.

But, I am not mad at Barack Obama. I knew he was a total sellout from the moment the Democrats gave him that national TV spotlight in 2004.

I am mad instead at all the Democrats who lied to us, promising that they would "hold Obama’s feet to the fire."

They told us that while Obama was far less than ideal as a candidate and that he was far too corporate to be real that we all needed to "Wait. Just wait. Give him a chance. You’ll see. We can do things with him in office. We can move him. We can do it! You’ll see. This is a movement for change."

Where did you all go?

In sickness and in health

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.


Arguments over health care are at a fever pitch. Supporters of President Obama's half-a**ed reforms are being drowned out by the hysterical mobs, some with alleged corporate ties, trying to prevent any change at all. Meanwhile, intelligent arguments against ObamaCare, from the left and the right, remain mostly unheard.

The problem is that all the scaremongering against Obama's meek proposal doesn't invalidate the fact that our system is seriously dysfunctional and needs some kind of fundamental change. The loudest opponents of (insert menacing music) SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, either real or imagined, aren't proposing any change whatsoever.

Many of the things that the Sarah Palins of this country are trying to scare Americans into believing would be the inevitable result of (insert menacing music) SOCIALIZED MEDICINE... well, those are things are already reality for many Americans in our present health care morass.

The New York Times had a disturbing piece on what is basically a mass clinic for medical refugees. It was held a place where health care is scarce... [and provided] free dental, medical and vision services, courtesy of a nonprofit group that more typically provides mobile health care for the rural poor.

Except this 'giant MASH unit' was not held in some miserable African refugee camp or remote Central American village. And it certainly was not held in a country with (insert menacing music) SOCIALIZED MEDICINE.

It was held in Los Angeles, the second largest city in the country that repeatedly pats itself on the back for having the best health care system in the world. The nonprofit group running the camp typically serves people in rural parts of the United States, where access to health care is notoriously poor.

Similarly, much of the scaremongering against any role for government in health care is based on the premise that it would take turn our stellar system into a nightmare where bureaucrats, not doctors, decide who lives and who dies. This piece in The Atlantic reminds us that such a nightmare is already the reality for many Americans.

The piece, entitled 'How American Health Care Killed My Father,' is described as such: After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.

The $1 million per day propaganda campaign run by the insurance lobby has focused primarily on smearing countries with universal health care, primarily Canada and Great Britain. Granted, Obama's weak plan doesn't even vaguely resemble either system, but these folks will not let facts interfere with their agenda. If they did, they'd be put in the awkward position of badmouthing the popular Medicare and VA programs, which are (insert menacing music) SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and do resemble the Canadian and British systems respectively.

However, people in those countries have hit back against the willful ignorance and intentional deceit of the Know-Nothing smear campaign. Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper is under pressure from many quarters to defend his country's crown jewel against 'Swift Boat' style attacks made by those with zero first hand experience and largely ignorant of how it actually works.

Britons were similarly outraged at attacks on their National Health Service (NHS), a system whose survival was guaranteed by that hero even of conservative Americans Winston Churchill. Brits flooded Twitter with so many tweets in support of the NHS against 'right-wing American libel' that the website briefly crashed. #WeLoveTheNHS is still one of the hottest topics on Twitter.

Of course, neither of these prove anything but being opinions of those with actual first hand experience, they are certainly more authoritative and informed that virtually all of the half truths being bandied about over here.

And in many cases, a half truth would be an improvement.

Take the case of two British women who were exploited and lied to on behalf of a right-wing anti-reform group. A purported filmmaker invited the women to speak about cancer treatment in Britain for a purported documentary.

Except an excerpt of the footage was instead used in a propaganda ad trying to discredit the British NHS. The women objected to this blatant deceit. They also said they supported the NHS in general but just thought this particular aspect needed improvement. One woman said, "My point was not that the NHS shouldn't exist or that it was a bad thing. I think that our health service is not perfect but to get better it needs more public money, not less." According to the CBC, they both said wouldn't for a second trade their British system for the American one.

Not surprisingly, this NHS-endorsement did not make it into the right-wing ad.

Update: The Los Angeles Times also has a piece on the medical refugee camps.

Editor's note: I will be running two guest essays on health care this weekend. The first will detail one local man's account of his Kafkaesque dealings with an American health insurance conglomerate, an experience which leaves him begging for (insert menacing music) SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. The other is planned to be a first hand account of how the Canadian (universal) medicare system really works.