Medicare-For-All Will Stop Political Bosses from Playing Games with Deadly Diseases
By Thom
Hartmann, Independent Media Institute
Although it is the sort of thing
that we’ve come to expect because our unique-in-the-world, for-profit health
insurance system leaves Americans financially vulnerable to sickness but offers
huge profits to companies and CEOs in the system.
Some cynical people are
suggesting that the reason Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is
forcing teachers and children to sit for hours every day in classrooms with
unmasked children is because he wants them all to get infected with Covid…to
make money for a friend of his.
Seriously. There’s that
theory out there, and it’s almost too evil to believe it could be
true.
That DeSantis is intentionally
trying to expose children, families and public-school teachers to a deadly
disease simply because it’ll make a few million extra dollars for his largest donor, billionaire Ken
Griffin, whose fund is one of the biggest
stockholders in the company that makes the only available monoclonal antibody
drug approved to treat Covid.
And, of course, it might also
take out a few hundred unionized teachers, a bonus in any Republican’s book.
But it can’t be true that
DeSantis is spreading disease just to goose healthcare profits, can it?
After all, when the federal
government offered to give Florida billions of dollars to expand their Medicaid
program to provide free healthcare for the state’s working poor, Governor Rick
Scott and later Governor DeSantis said a firm “no.”
Even though all that money
coming into the state to pay for healthcare could have goosed up the profits of
any number of hospitals and health operations Griffin could invest in, DeSantis
still refused to expand Medicaid statewide. (He did eventually sign an
expansion of Medicaid for new moms, but it’s a pittance and arguably a shout-out to the
forced-birth crowd.)
Far more likely is that DeSantis
just wants to win the Republican primary for president in 2024 and thinks
having the Trump “base” and Fox “News” on his side will get him there.
After all, having hundreds of thousands of Floridians suffer disability or die — bankrupting family after family — just to score points with Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson demonstrates all the manly cred he’ll need. Right?
It’s another danger of having a
for-profit health insurance system that doesn’t cover everybody, so when a
corrupt governor like DeSantis uses death and disease for political
manipulation families end up ill, broke and desperate — as are millions of American families right now
because of Covid.
Whatever’s going on with
DeSantis, we’re not Brazil and we really do need to get past behaving like a
third-world country where the boss-man plays games with deadly diseases for
political gain.
And the best way to do that is
to finally join pretty much every other developed country in the world and put
into place a single-payer healthcare system like Medicare For All.
When this pandemic started,
America had 87 million uninsured or underinsured citizens. As a result, a FamiliesUSA study
found:
Nationally,
roughly 1 out of every 3 COVID-19 deaths are linked to health insurance gaps.
More than 40%
of all COVID-19 infections are associated with health insurance gaps.
By February 1,
2021, 10.9 million infections and 143,000 COVID-19 deaths may have been
associated with health insurance gaps.
A national healthcare program
that extended to all Americans would keep state governors from grandstanding on
healthcare issues. Even better, like every other developed country in the
world, it would provide a nexus for health data and a single point of advocacy
for health consumers, something sorely lacking today.
And it would keep America
healthy. As Public Citizen noted, “For every 10% increase in a county’s uninsured rate,
the researchers found a 70% increase in COVID-19 infections and nearly a 50%
increase in deaths from COVID-19.”
Uninsured people often live
paycheck-to-paycheck and have no paid sick days, so they have little choice but
to show up sick if they want to pay the rent and provide food for their
families. It’s well known that’s how and why flu and other communicable
diseases are transmitted by desperate low-wage workers and it’s one of the
strongest arguments for a national healthcare system.
Individual health is public
health, and vice-versa.
Our failure to put into place a
Medicare For All type of health insurance system causes uninsured or poorly
insured people to postpone medical care early in the course of a disease,
hoping to make it through without incurring medical expenses.
This is particularly dangerous
with Covid: monoclonal antibody treatment works to cut the severity of the
coronavirus infection, but only if given when first symptoms appear and before
people are so sick they need hospitalization; after that point it’s useless.
In a pandemic, a national health
insurance and healthcare system becomes critical to keeping the public safe.
I open my new book, The Hidden History of American Healthcare:
Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, with the story of how Taiwan used the national database
from their single-payer system to quickly put together a
testing-and-contact-tracing system that kept the coronavirus at bay through the
first year of the pandemic until vaccines became available.
Here, by contrast, our
for-profit health insurance system is so corrupt that the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently had to go after multiple insurance companies with the threat of huge fines for refusing to pay for
all or part of Covid testing, even though paying for it was mandated by federal
law.
When a single health insurance
CEO — like “Dollar Bill” McGuire of UnitedHealth — can walk away with over a billion dollars, you know
something is seriously screwed up.
Administering a health insurance
system is one of the easiest, most banal and straightforward processes in the
world, which is why most developed countries (and even small countries like Costa Rica) have the government perform that function with
single-payer instead of letting for-profit leeches skim billions off the top.
The Covid pandemic has shown how
well single-payer and other national systems work in countries like Canada and
across Europe, where medical bankruptcies are largely unknown. It’s
similarly exposed how corrupt and dysfunctional the American patchwork-quilt
for-profit system has become.
Medicare For All, like Canada
has, would save most American families thousands of dollars every year and do
away with the 500,000+ annual bankruptcies in this country that happen only
because somebody in the family got sick.
But it would kill the billions
every week in profits for the half-dozen corporate giants that dominate the
health insurance industry and throw millions every year at politicians and
PACs. So expect DeSantis and the Republican Party to continue to fight it tooth
and nail.
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.