Why do they hate Medicare for All? Investors in health insurance stock do very well. They have been taking your premiums denying you as many drugs, procedures, and coverage as possible, and then pocketing your payments in the form of dividends, undeserved inflated million-dollar salary to executives, and bribes (lobbying) to government officials, read politicians. In other words, they were legally killing Americans for a profit. Medicare for All gets them out of the picture.
Insurance companies now have major newspapers try to scare not only those who pay premiums but those who work in the fraudulent health insurance industrial complex. Recently the New York Times published the article titled “Medicare for All Would Abolish Private Insurance. ‘There’s No Precedent in American History.’”
Proponents want to sweep away our complex, confusing, profit-driven mess of a health care system and start fresh with a single government-run insurer that would cover everyone.
But doing away with an entire industry would also be profoundly disruptive. The private health insurance business employs at least a half a million people, covers about 250 million Americans, and generates roughly a trillion dollars in revenues. Its companies’ stocks are a staple of the mutual funds that make up millions of Americans’ retirement savings.
Such a change would shake the entire health care system, which makes up a fifth of the United States economy, as hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and pharmaceutical companies would have to adapt to a new set of rules. Most Americans would have a new insurer — the federal government — and many would find the health insurance stocks in their retirement portfolios much less valuable.
Yes! Destroying private health insurance for primary health care is what we want and have to do precisely. Is it disruptive? Of course, it is. But it is much less so than the millions who lose their lives, go bankrupt, or live in a state of permanent stress because of an immoral system that puts dollars for investors and executives over health care. What could be more disruptive?
We must change the discourse to where the pain is and not to the few that will no longer profit from people getting sick. We must not allow the minimization of the pain of the many.
If anyone doubts it is about money and not the well-being of our citizens, the concern in the article makes it clear. After all, not once did the article talk about the disruption to the daily lives of Americans because of our health care system. But it speaks to the fear of investors.
Simply talk of Medicare for all makes investors jittery. Shares of the large publicly held insurance companies, including Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealth, fell when Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, introduced her bill in late February, but have largely rebounded.
The effective takeover of the health insurance industry in the United States would mean a huge hit to the companies’ stocks, although the companies, which have additional lines of business, would most likely survive
the bills would give relief to insurance industry workers, they would provide no such compensation for investors. Not surprisingly, the insurance industry and many other health care industries vociferously oppose these plans and plan to spend heavily in fighting them.
Medicare for All bills, do take into account transitioning employees who would lose their jobs in the private insurance industry. But why would they compensate investors? Did they not profit enough from the legal suborning of murder by health care denial and over-pricing?
Let’s be clear. In health care, having a single-payer Medicare for All system is more efficient and much less expensive. If you eliminate payments to shareholders (who do nothing but collect a check comprised of your premiums), the millions that executive make for doing little, doctor’s staff whose job is to fight with a myriad of insurance companies, advertising cost, duplicitous computer/database cost and much more, it is impossible that there is any other way, period.
All discussions, arguments, and narratives to the contrary that a single-payer Medicare for All system is the most efficient and will cover everyone is an attempt to keep a for-profit system to transfer your hard earned dollars to a few wealthy individuals. They will try to scare you and make things more complicated than they are. They are not. Accept no less than single-payer Medicare for All. No private health insurance system can beat it lest we subsidize said system.