The times, they are a-changing (but not enough yet)
After two interminable years of reactionary rule, there is hope in the air. Nothing is a bigger reason for hope than the growing cry for health care for everybody. Whether it’s called Medicare for all, a single payer system, or something else, it comes down to this: The recognition that health care is a human right.
What more basic right could there be than the right that enables the exercise of every other right, the right to life itself? Morally, that is as elementary a principle as addition and subtraction are elementary operations in mathematics. But, as a twentieth century anthropologist argued, normal logic often does not prevail in the United States when confronted with what he called “pecuniary logic.”
The dictionary defines pecuniary as consisting of money or that which can be valued in money. Translation: in this country’s political system, money usually speaks louder than facts, truth, reason, ethics, principles, or even life.
Historically, every effort to provide a more inclusive health care system—from Medicare to Obamacare to Medicare for all—has been resisted fiercely by the mercenary medicine complex (MMC) [my term for the totality of interests, like for profit hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that want health care to be treated as a commodity and not a right], not only through political contributions but by propaganda campaigns based on lies, distortion, and fear mongering. That’s already happening in response to popular support for fundamental reform of U.S. health care. That kind of power (including the power that makes it possible to sell brazen lies in the face of stark facts) is why the United States, unique among the rich nations of the world, has a mercenary medical system.
So let’s inoculate ourselves against the MMC’s lies with some facts.
The United States spends far more per capita on health care than any other country in the world.
Total health expenditure per capita in PPP international U.S. dollars (not inflation-adjusted):
Given the colossal percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product that goes for health care, the country’s health outcomes are dismal and getting worse.
According to the just-released Bloomberg Healthiest Countries Index, which ranks 169 countries, the United States is the 35th healthiest country in the world, down from 34 last year. That’s still better than the ranking in a 2018 study published in The Lancet, a British medical journal considered one of the best in the world. The United States ranked 64th in that study.
It is not surprising then that there is a growing consensus among the people of the nation and progressive politicians that this must change. That has alarmed the ever-vigilant guardians of the status quo. Those with a direct economic interest in the continuation of the disastrous current health care system have formed a powerful coalition. The goal: To kill any form of humane heath care reform.
The New York Times reported on February 24 that the purpose of the members of the coalition, created last June, is to “preempt what they saw as an alarming groundswell of interests in proposals to expand the federal role in health care.”
“This is a slippery slope toward government-run health care for every American,” a top MMC lobbyist told the Times. And that is a bad thing? For the MMC, it is a disaster; for the average American it would be a godsend.
The lies already have started to roll. “We have a structure that frankly works for most Americans,” another advocate for the MMC told the New York Times. That would be a joke not worth telling if more people were familiar with the facts.
Now for a reality check. By the standards of the last three decades, it’s a huge step forward for a health care system based on need and not greed to be even proposed and discussed seriously. Yet, to steal a phrase from Will Rogers, we still have the best Senate money can buy. As long as we don’t throw out the rascals with our votes, Congress will not approve anything like Medicare for all. Still, reform proposals being floated by people like Democrat Kamala Harris and democratic socialist Bernie Sanders create hope by defining a new horizon toward which we can stride.
The forces arrayed against reform are too powerful right now; the balance is not in our favor. The excellent account in the Times describes what we need to overcome:
“In a daily fusillade of digital advertising, videos and Twitter posts, the coalition, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, says that Medicare for all will require tax increases and give politicians and bureaucrats control of medical decisions now made by doctors and patients—arguments that echo those made to stop Medicare in the 1960s, Mrs. Clinton’s health care plan in 1993, and the Affordable Care Act a decade ago.”
It’s a disinformation campaign right from the name of the group, and the talking points are not even original. These people talking about America’s healthcare future are those most interested in making that future as much like the past as possible.
