Single-payer / Medicare for all maligned by ignorance and ideology
Bill Maher, Van Jones, & Charles Cooke discussed single-payer / Medicare for all. Except for Jones, they completely missed the boat at times. It is painful to watch those from both the Left and the Right so miss the boat because they are clouded by the way things work now as opposed to the way they ought to work.
The clip starts with Van Jones defending the expectations of young people. Many on the Right and even Hillary Clinton have been given the impression that Bernie Sanders’ supporters want free stuff.
“Part of the thing with the young people, people say these young people just want a bunch of free stuff,” Van Jones said. “That is really unfair. Nobody says that NASA wants free space shuttles. Nobody says the Pentagon wants free drones. You have this consensus that we all pay taxes. And then you figure out where the money goes. And what the young people are saying is we spend money on dumb wars. We are spending money on prisons. Stop spending money on that and spend money on us.”
Conservative National Review’s Right Wing pseudo-intellectual Charles Cooke chimed in that even with reapportioning of funds; there just isn’t enough money for the things Bernie Sanders is promising. Van Jones chimed back in pointing out a fact. The power of quantitive easing by the Fed could actually generate the money flows for free education. They did it for the banks, why not for the average citizens? It has to do with inflation and devaluation, but that is out of scope for this post. Suffice it to say it can be done.
The conversation then went specifically to single-payer. Cooke made the silly statement that single-payer could not be paid for. Bill Maher chimed in with the reality that a single-payer proposal failed to come to pass in Liberal Vermont. Maher said it is because politicians fear telling suppliers (drug companies, etc.) they must control their cost.
Charles Cooke then came back in with a statement that shows he neither understands humanity nor reality. He claims that all single-payer countries around the world ration while Bernie Sanders’ single-payer plan has no rationing. Let’s first get to the reality of health care in America. America rations more than any country in the world. How? If you have money, you get good health care. If you don’t have money, you get some health care if you qualify for Medicaid else you get none. You die. In every single-payer system around the world, you get basic health care. Secondly, we pay so much for healthcare, eliminating the insurance companies and regulating the industry to stop the overcharging, which simply transfers wealth to a few at the top, will minimize rationing.
One wishes math would take precedence over ideology. To be clear, in healthcare, profit is an inefficiency.Current health care expenses include shareholder dividend, advertising, high paid executive, and the like. Those are huge unnecessary costs that are currently relegated to healthcare. I’ve written about the fraud that is our healthcare system (recently here & here)
But I leave you with two questions. One from Van Jones and the other from Bill Maher. It is something we must do something about.
“Why do we have private insurance companies at all,” Jones asked. “Shouldn’t insurance be for stuff you aren’t sure about? For instance, you get car insurance because you are not sure if you are going to have an accident. You aren’t sure if your house is going to catch fire or get a flood. You get fire insurance, flood insurance. You can be sure of one thing. At some point, you are going to get sick. And at some point, you are going to die. Why do you need insurance for that? Don’t you just need health care?”
“But is is even more basic than that,” said Bill Maher. “Why should life, and death, and sickness be up for the profit motive.”
Lear more about single-payer here.