The common rejoinder against universal healthcare is that it is “politically impossible.” What pundits like Ezra Klein mean when they note “health care is simply too big, too complicated, too dangerous to touch” is that the major political parties essentially agree not to fight about it. What these commentators are really saying is that the stakeholders in the current system are too powerful to challenge. John Conyers did manage to get 115 House Democrats to cosponsor a Bernie Sanders-inspired Medicare-for-all bill in 2017, but most of the Democratic establishment most likely agrees with Hillary Clinton that single payer “will never, ever come to pass.” She said that when she was running for president in 2016.
This is not a fight that either of the major parties wants to have. The healthcare sector rivals finance for the most money spent lobbying Congress in the last 20 years. Both major parties are lavishly financed with healthcare industry money. Neither major party wants to pick a fight that is likely to rob them of such a rich and willing pleasure palace of campaign funding.
Bernie Sanders was only able to start agitating for Medicare-for-all from outside the confines of the two-party system. The fact that he was able to gain any traction on this issue took Democrats completely by surprise. It shouldn’t have. Eighty years of polling show an American public that is open to increasing the government’s role in healthcare. In 1938 an overwhelming 78 percent of respondents said the government should be responsible for providing healthcare for those who are unable to pay for it. For decades, even when no one in the American political system would say the words “universal healthcare” that opinion has remained persistently high. Only in the 2000s, after more than a decade of well-financed agitation propaganda against universal healthcare from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, did the number supporting government intervention ever drop below 50 percent. Before that, in 1990 even 50 percent of Republican voters strongly agreed that the government had a responsibility to help the sick (a number that has been pushed down to around 25 percent today). But the number of Americans who are dead set against government involvement in healthcare and who believe people “should take care of things themselves” has never risen above a 21 percent minority.
Insurance companies are well aware where public opinion sits. The American people are unhappy with the current profit-driven healthcare system and after Bernie Sanders proved that they were willing to consider other options the smell of blood was in the water. In 2018 an underfunded 33 year-old man named Abdul El-Sayed announced a run for governor in Michigan with a plan to cover everyone in the state with a publicly-funded single payer health insurance plan. Before Bernie the establishment would likely have dismissed the notion of a Muslim candidate running on a single payer healthcare plan as pure fantasy. Instead, Michigan’s largest insurance company Blue Cross Blue Shield panicked. Throwing all their support behind a Democratic opponent who supported the Affordable Care Act, Blue Cross mobilized their political action committee bluePAC (one of the 10 biggest lobbying organizations in the state) to pressure employees into forking over major “donations” to preserve their livelihoods. Managers were encouraged to pay at least $100, Vice Presidents $1,000, corporate officers $2,500, and every member of the board of directors $6,800. The stakes are very high and there is almost no limit on how much health industry players will spend to preserve their ability to make money off our sickness and medical misfortune. They are right to be worried. We can put an end to this and it's becoming more likely every day.
This is part 5 of a series on how capitalism is destroying American healthcare.
You can find PART ONE HERE.
You can find PART TWO HERE.
You can find PART THREE HERE.
You can find PART FOUR HERE.
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Let’s make them pay.
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