The Chris Moeller Archives

Single-payer now!

In the waning days of the American Empire, after the subverted government had gone to such disrepair that it proved itself incapable of dealing effectively with virtually any conceivable crisis, the people were being hoodwinked by counterfeit reformers bought and paid for by the monied interests and profiteers that Jefferson, Lincoln, and even Eisenhower had warned us against.

In President Obama, we have a leader that is cowardly and as naive in political leadership as his campaign opponents last year fearmongered us that he would be. As even White House aides have admitted, the success of his presidency will ride on the outcome of his health care initiative this fall, which is why it's puzzling and alarming that the idea he's chosen to promote in hopes of reforming our disastrous medical access system is almost exactly the one pitched last year by GOP cyborg Mitt Romney.

Obama rode to Washington in 2008 on the wings of a unicorn, believing that compromise was possible with Republicans-- and even some Democrats, it now seems-- who would prefer to cut his political tendons and send his presidency to the trash heap of history next to Bush/Cheney. Obama threw the single-payer system-- the only economically-viable solution here or anywhere in the world-- off the boat months ago in return for the support of the well-heeled pharmaceutical industry. Of course, there was never a guarantee that Republicans would fall in line anyway, and so the biggest bargaining chip for his number one presidential priority was out the window before he had even finished enrolling his kids in private school.

In the United States Senate, to which Americans sent a whopping 60 Democrats with a mandate to enact policies of progressive reform, a single Democrat, Max Baucus of Montana, single-handedly destroyed the Democrats' majority in respect to health care reform by assigning control of the issue in his committee to a so-called "Gang of 6" comprised of 3 Democrats and 3 Republicans, which any state-educated mathematician can tell you is not a majority at all. The three Republicans, including Iowa's Chuck Grassley, have accepted political contributions from insurance and health care companies of nearly $3.5 million between them, and Baucus alone has wrangled $2,880,631. But maybe they'll all still act in the best interests of the millions of uninsured Americans out of the kindness of their hearts.

Under House Bill 3200, employers will be obligated to provide health care coverage to their workers, but if a worker rejects the offered plan, he or she is barred from buying any other insurance in the "exchange" program, including that of the public option. To make the legislation worse, employers have no mandate or incentive to offer anything but subpar, bottom-of-the-barrel care options. The wrinkles in the legislation are in fact designed to fuck up the public option so badly that it matches the ineffectiveness of the private ones, thus insuring that "competition" will continue. As Senator Bernie Sanders explained it to Rolling Stone, "If you have coverage you like, you can keep it. If you have coverage you don't like, you gotta keep it."

Even in his televised address to Congress Wednesday night, Obama admitted that the reason he believes single-payer wouldn't work is because we have an insurance industry that needs to be propped up. He didn't phrase it that way, of course, but close. He said that single-payer "wouldn't work" because the industry he's trying to protect comprises approximately a quarter of our economy. As one caustic commentator pointed out, insurance companies claiming they would be at a competitive disadvantage against a government-run plan is like Keanu Reeves claiming he got swindled out of an Oscar because he was disadvantaged by being a shitty actor.

Other countries manufacture actual products. Ours used to. Now it keeps its economy afloat by crippling the physical and mental health of its citizens. We know our private health insurance is garbage. It's so bad that three-quarters of all people who file for bankruptcy because of health reasons have insurance, and they go bankrupt anyway. Now they'll (you'll) be forced to buy this pathetic product.

There's nobody in Washington allowed to even make the case for single-payer thanks to the well-entrenched system of legalized bribery. Somebody's palm has to get greased with every piece of legislation. If we're lucky, it's only one. There are well-financed lies circulating that single-payer would do away with private doctors when it would really only do away with private health care insurance. This would be bad news for insurance companies and celebrities like Wilford Brimley and Alex Trebek who would have to find new products to pimp to the elderly on daytime television, but it would be good news for everybody else in America. In fact, it might even save America. It would help correct our home foreclosure crisis. It would eliminate $350 billion a year that's wasted on paperwork as hospitals and clinics send reimbursement requests to more than 1,300 private insurers. Nearly a third of all health care costs in this country go just to administration. Permitting this corporate graft upon the nation's health (literally) amounts to a bailout to exceed even the one President Giveaway already handed the banks, and with just as little taxpayer oversight.

Single-payer is moral, it already works in every other industrialized, democratic country, and according to this analysis, it can be had for $644 billion a year. And $484 million of that is already being paid covering the much-higher-cost elderly and permanently disabled in the Medicare program. Just another $160 billion would make Medicare universal, and that's less than we spend per year keeping Afghanistan safe from Osama bin Laden (who by all accounts is in Pakistan), or certainly in trillion-dollar bank bailouts and bailout-following bailouts.

Medicaid, the entire Veterans Administration program, and uncompensated hospital care (explained in the link above) could be eliminated with a single-payer system, and what $160 billion would cost taxpayers home by home would be made up for in spades by Americans never again having to pony up for co-pays or out-of-pocket hospital expenses, deductibles, employee contributions on health premiums (all of which can amount to thousands now in some households), or bank bailouts for dead mortgages. State and local taxes could be reduced without having to cover their specific health-care burdens... Hell, employers might even be able to offer higher wages after being relieved of having to insure employees and their families, if they don't try to pocket it.

I don't know how to be bolder with this presentation: A single-payer system is so clearly the best and only solution that even debate at this point seems like just more dangerous distraction. It would have been the law of the land decades ago, as it has in the most prosperous countries around the globe, except that Washington D.C. is a cesspool filled with public misinformation, extortion, graft, and corruption.

posted by CM @ 9:46 AM