Some bloodsuckers are completely useless
By Thom Hartmann, Independent Media Institute
Most, like ticks and mosquitos, while they may provide food for birds, bats and other animals, seem to provide no direct benefit at all to humans.
That “no benefit”
equation goes double for the latest parasites who have attached themselves to
the backs of Americans and are rapidly draining us of our economic blood:
health insurance companies.
There is
quite literally no reason for these corporations to exist, at least when it
comes to providing for the health needs of 99 percent of Americans.
Virtually
every other developed country in the world has a universal healthcare system to
provide for the needs of all of their citizens. The one exception is Switzerland,
where everyone is required to purchase health insurance, but all the primary
health insurance companies must operate as nonprofits and the federal
government pays the premiums for low income and poor people.
Other
developed countries typically have a few health insurance companies around but
mostly they serve the very wealthy, insuring that if they become sick or
injured they get private suites in the hospital or have jet- and
helicopter-based air ambulance service when out of country. In a few countries
they fill in cracks, like for dental or eyeglasses. But, other than
Switzerland, that’s it.
Severe
parasite infections can cripple a host’s ability to respond to disease, and
that’s just what’s happening to America right now as we’ve faced and continue to
face the Covid pandemic. More than half of all Americans who’ve become
infected with Covid and survived are now “struggling with medical debt” as a
result of their illness, according to a new study by The Commonwealth Fund.
Even
people who didn’t get Covid are being wiped out by medical debt:
Think
about the people who live around you, on your street or in your apartment
building. Imagine one out of every five of them, from the very old to
newborns, having already had their medical debt turned over to another
parasitic American industry, debt collectors.
One in five Americans. Today. Are in collection for medical debt.
Getting harassing phone calls day and night. Having their checking
accounts garnished, their credit and ability to get a new job ruined for years
or decades. One in every five people in America. And every one of
their lives has been turned upside-down because they or their child got sick.
We are
the only developed country in the world that does this to its citizens, and the
only reason we do it is so people like Bill McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth,
can walk away with, literally, a billion dollars.
Meanwhile, the University of Chicago finds that 8 million Americans have started a crowdfunding page to raise money to cover their own medical bills, and an additional 12 million pages have been started by others trying to pay bills of friends, relatives, children or grandparents who aren’t computer literate.
One third
of all GoFundMe and similar sites are people trying to raise money to pay for
medical bills not covered by insurance companies. Families like George Fushi’s
are desperately turning to the contributions of friends and even strangers to
simply avoid homelessness.
A City University of New York/Harvard study found that the number one cause of bankruptcy in America
is medical debt; it averages over a half-million families wiped out this way
every year. The number of people in Canada, all of western Europe,
Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan who went bankrupt
exclusively from medical debt last year: Zero.
As Michael Hiltzik writes for the Los Angeles
Times: “It’s also virtually unique to the
U.S. among developed countries; when experts from Japan and Europe were asked
by the PBS program ‘Frontline’ about the prevalence of medical bankruptcy in
their countries, some had trouble even comprehending the question.”
Poll
after poll shows that a solid majority
— 60 to 80 percent, depending on how the question is phrased — want America’s
legislators to put a national healthcare system in place or give people an easy
and inexpensive option to buy into our biggest single payer system,
Medicare.
And,
indeed, we still have two single-payer systems left over from LBJ’s Great
Society programs in the 1960s that were able to get passed just a decade before
the US Supreme Court legalized political bribery and corruption: Medicare and
Medicaid.
Medicare,
of course, pays for healthcare for people over 65, and Medicaid covers
healthcare costs for low-income working people, the profoundly poor and elderly
folks in nursing homes. The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid
coverage to all low-income Americans…until five “conservative” justices
on the Supreme Court changed the law to let individual states decide if their
citizens deserved it.
Twelve
states today deny Medicaid to many or most of their low-income working citizens
even though the federal government pays for almost all of it. Every
single one’s legislature is run entirely by Republicans: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi,
North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and
Wyoming.
That’s no
coincidence: the GOP has been the party of billionaires and predatory
corporations ever since Warren Harding’s election in 1920, when it turned its
back on Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and purged the Party of its
progressives.
They then
spent the past four decades stacking the federal court system and the Supreme
Court with partisan hacks and prostitutes to big money and big business so they
could continue their bloody business of extracting cash from working people and
shoveling it into the money bins of the morbidly rich.
But it’s
not just low-income people who are being sucked dry by our medical
industry. The study by Commonwealth Fund found that fully a third
of insured Americans under 65 had difficulties paying off medical debt
last year. The same was true for half of uninsured Americans under
65 just in the past year.
In my new
book The
Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes
Others Insanely Rich, I lay out how the
average American is paying around $3000 a year more for healthcare and
health insurance than Canadians, Europeans, Japanese and South Koreans.
That
money is lining of the pockets of the literally thousands of health industry
executives who each “earn” over a million dollars a year (some “earning” tens
or hundreds of millions a year). We pay 18-20 percent of our GDP for healthcare
and healthcare insurance.
By
comparison, Taiwan’s singly-payer healthcare system in its entirety, including
doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, all care facilities, all billing and payment
operations — everything — costs that country just a bit over 6 percent of
GDP. In most developed countries it’s 6 to 14 percent.
Insurance
premiums make up 24 percent of gross US payroll, while a Canadian-style
nonprofit Medicare-For-All system would cost between 10 and 14 percent
depending on how it was implemented.
And every
effort Democrats make to deal with the problem — including their most recent
“infrastructure” bill that would cut drug prices and expand Medicaid to those
12 states that have refused to do so themselves — faces 100% rigid opposition
from bought-and-paid-for elected Republicans.
Meanwhile,
the healthcare industry has funded literally hundreds of websites and
“advocacy” organizations that have flooded the internet with lies and
misinformation about how healthcare is done around the world or the “horrors of
single-payer.” Just try googling the issue and you’ll find the majority
of the top hits come from these sources: the industry is readying for
war.
As Covid
sweeps across America with a fourth wave, this time hitting the Red states and
counties hardest because their unvaccinated citizens have been listening to
Republican politicians and watching Fox “News,” medical bankruptcies are starting to explode.
The only
way to deal with parasites is to remove them from their host. It’s time
to expand Medicare to full coverage in all regards for all Americans so we can
dislodge these healthcare parasites from our body politic.
Author Bio: Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Healthcare and more than 30 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.
This article was produced by Economy
for All, a project of the Independent
Media Institute.
