It is an irrefutable fact that a Single-Payer Medicare for All health care system is not only more efficient but cost much less than the health care system we have now in America. It is all about math. And math is absolute.
Purposefully sloppy reporting about Single-Payer Medicare for all is a more significant hurdle to overcome than the transition to the program itself. This morning a New York Times article peaked my interest. I go excited. The title of the piece, “Single Payer Health Care in California: Here’s What It Would Take” was misleading. It was what any thinking person who reads between the lines an article that pretty much tells Americans the transition would be too complicated to become a reality.
The first diss occurred early in the article as it characterized Democrats adopting the Single-Payer as merely a “rallying cry.” In other words, it will not come to pass, but it can be used to activate, fool a bunch of folks. The author writes.
Even beyond California, many Democrats are hoping to energize supporters by taking a cue from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, which embraced a single-payer system, “Medicare for All.” But the idea primarily functions as a rallying cry.
The author then posits the base of the article which is that Americans have not thought through what Single-Payer means.
“Voters are thinking about the fundamental values associated with single-payer,” said Kelly Hall, an independent health consultant who works with the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers in California, which has endorsed Mr. Newsom. “Almost zero voters have thought about the policy implications.”
In this case, “implications” could be another word for booby traps. Even a state as big, wealthy and liberal as California — with the world’s fifth-largest economy and nearly 40 million people — would find itself hamstrung by money, a legal and regulatory thicket, and highly motivated opposition.
It is not the job of the voters to figure out how to implement a Single-Payer. It is the job of the politicians and the experts not influenced by a for-profit health care system that depends on people being sick and the monopoly of being the arbiters of drug delivery.
Why not start with the absoluteness of the mathematical implications of Single-Payer. Everything else is a process with the private sector’s wish to continue the profit through pilfering modal.
The rest of the article is an enumeration of all the obstacles that a Single-Payer transition would face. None of them were more difficult than the draconian change to the Affordable Care Act who’s real difficulty was placating drug companies, health care deliverers, insurance companies, all before the patients.
Here are some irrefutable facts. Having multiple insurance companies for primary health care makes no sense. They are risk managers that split the nation into pools of sick and not-so-sick people to ensure that excess premiums collected go into the pockets of executives and shareholders. It is also costly to market this evil business model to convince Americans that one insurance company is better than the other. Paying a bill requires no innovation, so there is no need for a profit incentive.
Drug/Pharmaceutical companies are just the welfare recipients of government-funded drug development. Don’t let their advertising and cries fool you. You pay them twice for the drugs. You pay to develop them with taxpayer dollars. And then they rip you off not to recover any expenses but under the tenet of “what the market will bear.” And what will the market bear? — your bankruptcy. Why aren’t taxpayers getting their fair share from massive pharma companies profits? Because we have a media that willfully concentrated on the issues least important to Americans.
When Americans want something done, they eventually do it. It, however, requires strong, persistent moral leaders to stand up and take all the incoming flak and hurdles and keep marching on. That is how America built the Panama Canal, what seemed then an engineering impossibility. That is how we got to the moon. That is how we got civil rights for all, women’s, LGBTQ’s rights even though they were not initially popular.
If Americans are informed truthfully, they will force politicians to do their job. Americans will ultimately realize that all the obstacles to Single-Payer are not financial but instead caused by the private sector’s refusal to accept that it is immoral to profit from and depend on people being continually sick for growth.