- Do you have health insurance?
If you have health insurance, whether public (Medicare, Medicaid) or private (through an employer), we invite you to conduct the following thought experiment: imagine you don’t. Or imagine that you do, but that you have – just as an example – a $40 co-pay for every doctor’s visit (normal) and an $8,000 deductible (normal), plus a $1,500 per month insurance payment for a total of $18,000 per year. So, if you have a healthcare emergency – not a big one, just an average-type emergency such as a broken bone from a fall which doesn’t require hospitalization – your out-of-pocket yearly cost before insurance starts to cover your costs is $26,000 – that’s more than $2000 a month for that particular year, without counting co-pays.
Between 30 and 40 million people in the U.S. are uninsured at any given time. Another 40 million are underinsured, for a total of 80 million people, or nearly 25% of the U.S. population. It’s estimated that half the U.S. population doesn’t have $400 in reserve for any type of financial emergency – a car accident, a major illness, storm damage to their home, nothing.
A recent Lancet article by a group of Yale physicians has estimated that Medicare for All (M4A) would in fact save the U.S. $450 billion a year (largely in economies of scale through greatly-reduced administrative costs, pharmaceuticals savings, standardized payments to hospitals and physicians for standard procedures rather than “boutique” pricing, in other words “whatever-the-market-allows” pricing) and save 68,000 lives.
Here are some advantages of M4A:
- Your costs will be incorporated in your payroll taxes – rich people will pay more through higher tax rates, meaning that taxation for medical care will be progressive – the fairest form of taxation we have; if you’re poor (and there’s no shame in that, none), you’ll pay less or much less – but you’ll receive the same care, go to the same physicians, the same hospitals, and be entitled to the same medications as the wealthy;
- If you have diabetes – or any chronic disease – you won’t have to pay for your monthly medication. And the government will be getting those meds at negotiated rates – so, at a vastly cheaper cost than today. Savings for you, and huge savings for the government – which translates into tax savings for us all – it’s a virtuous cycle.
- Worried about your insurance company’s Byzantine complex of “narrow networks”? Those will be eliminated by M4A. You’ll have the right to the physicians – and specialist medical care generally – you need. [note: we said “right,” not “privilege”]
- Do you have a relative or friend or colleague forced into medical bankruptcy? You’re not alone – there are about 500,000 medical bankruptcies declared yearly, half of the total of personal bankruptcies. It’s now estimated that following a cancer diagnosis, a retired couple goes through their entire life savings in the first two years of treatment – and they’re left with nothing for the rest of their lives. Under M4A, medical bankruptcies will become a thing of the past.
- Do you need dental work? Very few plans cover dentistry (the ADA has been remarkably successful in ensuring you don’t have dental coverage in your plan). M4A will cover you.
- And it will cover vision care as well.
The U.S. is absolutely and totally alone among developed nations in not having some form of universal healthcare for its people – and there are plenty of nations on the list whose per capita income is much lower than that of the U.S. When someone tells you “But we can’t afford it,” ask them how Costa Rica (middle-class income: $9000 p.a.) or Greece (median net income: $17,700 p.a. ) can afford it.
It’s not a matter of “can’t afford it,” it’s a question of priorities. As Illinois’ Governor put it last week in his annual budget address, when he reminded the General Assembly that every budget decision is ultimately a moral decision.
Universal health care is part of the “packet” of social welfare benefits that came along for most countries in the 20th century. The U.S. is coming to it about 70 years late – President Harry Truman made an effort in 1945:
“In a draft message to Congress in 1947, Truman wrote: ‘Healthy citizens constitute our greatest natural resource, and prudence as well as justice demands that we husband that resource. … as a nation we should not reserve good health and long productive life for the well-to-do, only, but should strive to make good health equally available to all citizens.
“Truman later called it the greatest disappointment of his presidency.”
[Note: Guess where Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law? The Truman Library – Johnson characterized Truman as the “daddy of Medicare.”)
More and more people are saying: “It’s time for universal health care in the U.S.”
Deedspeakout would go further: “It’s way past time for universal health care in the U.S.”
- Moreover:
If you think M4A is too expensive, just try not implementing it
Robert Reich weighs in on the “We can’t afford it” angle of not implementing M4A – or really, any of the major plans being proposed:
“Medicare for All will cost a lot, but the price of doing nothing about America’s increasingly dysfunctional healthcare system will soon be in the stratosphere. The nation already pays more for healthcare per person and has worse health outcomes than any other advanced country. A new study in the Lancet estimates that Medicare for All would save $450bn and prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year.”
The Green New Deal?
“A Green New Deal might be expensive but doing nothing about climate change will almost certainly cost far more. California is already burning, the midwest and south are flooding, New England is eroding, Florida is sinking. If we don’t launch something as bold as a Green New Deal, we’ll spend trillions coping with the consequences of our failure to be bold.”
And how about all that other “free stuff” which is “we can’t afford”?
“Investing in universal childcare, public higher education and woefully outdated and dilapidated infrastructure will be expensive too, but the cost of not making these investments would be astronomical. American productivity is already suffering and millions of families can’t afford decent childcare, college or housing – whose soaring costs are closely related to inadequate transportation and water systems.”
Yes, there would be huge up-front costs involved in a just transition to universal health care, free college (without student debt), cleaning up our degraded natural environment, building a 21st-century infrastructure in line with a sustainable and equitable future. Consider, however:
“But even if it paid a small fraction of the costs of their proposals, so what? As long as every additional dollar of spending reduces by more than a dollar the future costs of climate change, inadequate healthcare and insufficient public investment, it makes sense to spend more.”
In other words, we’d be investing now on behalf of future generations’ welfare, not to mention the Earth’s survival.
We’ve done it before, it’s time – way past time, in fact – to do it again.