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Why I Support ‘Medicare For All’ — And You Should, Too

Why I Support ‘Medicare For All’ — And You Should, Too

What do we want our health care system to do? Care for our health! Yours, mine, our families’, our country’s. But don’t look for such straightforward logic or ethics in the labyrinthian industrial complex that now controls the “care” we get — or are denied. The structure itself must be changed if care and the Common Good are ever to be prized over profit.

The proof of that is made clear by the Affordable Care Act, the admirable attempt passed almost a decade ago to mitigate the effects of unrestrained corporate greed. Dubbed Obamacare, the ACA dramatically decreased the number of uninsured Americans. And yet — because its Democratic authors caved to corporate demands that the profiteering structure be kept intact — Obamacare cannot deliver the universal coverage and range that other (often less wealthy) countries provide.

Don’t despair, for a warm glow of hope beckons from the very midst of today’s cold, often nightmarish system. Millions of Americans are doing much, much better through an alternative structure that already delivers superior care for much less: Medicare.

This government program pays the health care bills of 44 million Americans — those over 65 and 9 million younger people with disabilities. For more than half a century, Medicare has comforted and benefited so many patients and families that it’s now treasured and integral to our people’s sense of the Common Good. Yes, the program needs more controls to prevent hospitals, drugmakers and others from overcharging taxpayers and doing unnecessary treatments, but such fixes are included in various bills to extend the successful program to all Americans: “Medicare for All.”

As shown by other countries, a universal single-payer system eliminates insurance middlemen, dramatically cuts administrative waste, reins in price gouging and focuses care on the less-costly approach of improving long-term health. Thus, while Medicare for All would cover every American — from birth to death — it would actually reduce what we pay for the inefficient, insufficient, incomplete coverage provided by today’s industrial health complex. Check the numbers:

U.S. health expenditures jumped 16.5 percent between 2009 and 2016 for corporate-insured patients, while the cost dropped 2 percent for Medicare patients — despite their having more complicated, chronic and expensive problems. The for-profit system eats up 12 percent of its of budget just on billing and paper shuffling, compared to Medicare’s 2 percent. Even a 2019 Koch-funded analysis concluded that Medicare for All would cut U.S. health spending by $2 trillion over 10 years. Less ideologically biased studies estimate even higher savings from Medicare for All’s administrative efficiencies.

Taxpayers already foot the bill for nearly two-thirds of America’s health care spending — including Medicare, Medicaid and the subsidies that corporations get for their health plans, plus coverage for congressmembers, veterans and a few other groups. Medicare for All’s big savings (as shown above) mean overall expenditures would drop while the quality and quantity of coverage would rise. And any additional funding needed for full universal coverage could come from progressive tax mechanisms (e.g., a transaction tax on Wall Street speculation) that don’t cost middle-income families a penny.

America’s Medicare patients are regularly able to get more timely appointments than privately insured people. In fact, delays in the corporate system are growing worse, as so much of doctor and staff time is consumed by insurance company red tape (plus, private insurers are increasingly limiting policyholders’ choice of doctors). Also, among advanced countries, our corporate-run system produces by far the highest percentage of people who skip treatment because they can’t afford it — making some wait times … eternal.

Every major Medicare for All bill in Congress includes several transitional years, with substantial funding for training, placement and other assistance for those whose jobs will not be part of the restructured system. Besides, some new administrative and fraud protection jobs will be created in the single-payer program, and universal provision of dental, mental health and other health services will create new jobs as well.

Health care giants already spend more than half a billion bucks a year on lobbying — the most of any industry — and that spending is mushrooming as they rush to maintain, by hook or crook, the status quo ethic of profits over care. But a growing majority of Americans see that we’re being robbed of our money, health and rights, and they’re demanding that politicians reject the entrenched interests and produce real change. (At least 48 of our newly elected congressmembers ran on pledges to support Medicare for All or similar health justice programs.) The power of the establishment’s money and lies wilts in the face of the moral imperative that is at the heart of Medicare for All: Everyone deserves, as a human right, affordable access to quality health care.

Democratic Aspirations Are Headed For The Ash Heap

Democratic Aspirations Are Headed For The Ash Heap

Most political analysts and pundits — myself included — spent the election season predicting the death of the Republican Party, which was embroiled in civil war. We were right: The GOP, at least the GOP of Ronald Reagan and the George Bushes, is dead.

The party in power calls itself Republican, but it is really the party of Donald Trump. We are about to find out what that means.

Still — along with dismissing the plausibility of a President Trump — the commentariat missed an equally important development that is now startlingly obvious: The Democratic Party is bleeding out and near death, too. It may not be terminal, but it is certainly comatose. It may recover, but even if it does, its health will be fragile for years, if not decades, to come.

As a few recounts around the country continue, it’s clear that Republican governors and state legislative candidates have romped to victory in most races. The GOP (or the party of Trump) now controls the vast majority of governorships and legislatures. Brooklyn College history professor Robert David Johnson told The Washington Post that a political party has not been so dominant since the World War II era.

That’s after taking into account the smoldering heap of Democratic aspirations left behind at the federal level. Republicans now control the White House, both branches of Congress and, shortly, the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only is there a vacancy left by the death of Antonin Scalia, but there are two justices over the age of 80 (liberal Ruth Bader Ginsberg and moderate Anthony Kennedy) and one who is 78 (liberal Stephen Breyer).

That means that Trump could conceivably pick four justices with no resistance from a GOP-controlled Senate. If he chooses conservative justices who are, say, in their 50s, the nation’s governing document will be interpreted by a right-wing faction for more than a generation.

That means that President Obama, whom Democrats once believed would be transformational, will have no legacy beyond serving two terms as the nation’s first black president. Every major policy or program he put in place is about to be overturned. His executive orders on issues such as deportation will be easiest to reverse, of course.

But a President Trump will also find few obstacles on his way to repealing the Affordable Care Act. Or rolling back Obama’s agreement with Iran limiting its nuclear program. Or reversing the president’s seemingly historic treaty to curb climate change. The Donald has pledged to rescind all these, and there is no reason to doubt him. Republican leaders already had those legacy-making accomplishments in their gun-sights.

Looking back, the signs of a Democratic Party skating toward disaster have been apparent for some time. Since Obama’s first term, news accounts have recorded the decline of state Democratic organizations around the country, a dangerous frailty that became more apparent after the 2010 midterm elections.

The backlash against President Obama was already in full roar, and furious Tea Partiers and their GOP establishment allies turned out at the ballot box in droves. The highly vaunted Obama coalition, by contrast, apparently didn’t understand the importance of those elections, and Republicans took over statehouses, Congress and the U.S. Senate. But because the White House was still in Democratic hands, it was easier to overlook the vulnerabilities lurking just beneath the level of the Oval Office.

Now, there is nothing to stop a rollback of the personal liberties and human rights that Americans had begun to take for granted. Vice President-elect Pence, a Christian fundamentalist, will surely want abortion rights abolished and the full array of gay and lesbian rights curbed. Gay marriage? There is every reason to expect right-wingers will try to get a new Supreme Court to overturn its historic marriage ruling.

Perhaps, though, those rollbacks in personal and civil liberties would seed a rebirth of the progressive movement and the political party that has, for decades now, been associated with it: the Democratic Party. It’s a shame that the nation will first have to suffer through some oppressive times to get there.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

IMAGE: Campaign Chairman John Podesta  hugs Tina Flournoy, chief of staff to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, as they attend an event being held by Hillary Clinton to address her staff and supporters about the results of the U.S. election at a hotel in the Manhattan borough of New York, U.S., November 9, 2016. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

5 Hidden Ways Obama Has Transformed America For The Better

5 Hidden Ways Obama Has Transformed America For The Better

Judge President Obama’s results by how desperate Republicans are to reverse them.

And if you still aren’t certain how transformative the 44th president’s policies and actions have been in transforming the American economy, read Michael Grunwald’s new Politico Magazine mini-opus “The Nation He Built.” As in his 2012 book The New New Deal, which revealed the story and impact of the Stimulus, Grunwald digs in and finds the scope and depth of the advances of the last seven years have again surprised even him.

What the American people don’t know about this presidency is a big part of the hidden story. For instance, only 1 of 10 Americans are aware the Stimulus gave middle class workers an almost secret tax cut when the economy needed it the most, and the massive deficit savings could add decades to the life of Medicare. Obama’s accomplishments — beyond preventing a greater depression, insuring 17 million and leading us into the Obamaboom, our longest private-sector job expansion ever — are complex, purposely subtle, and almost impossible to convey in a 30-second ad.

As soon as he took office, Obama refused to be the president who just prevented a greater depression.

“He wanted to do stuff, not just avoid stuff,” Grunwald writes. “He wanted to be a Ronald Reagan of the left.”

To do this he committed his advisors to focus on policies that worked and told them to leave the politics to him. This approach has enabled him to enact the kind of change that has tilted government back toward advocating for people in a way comparable to the way Reagan shifted the scales towards the rich and their favorite people — corporations . While no one thing he’s enacted has been as paradigm-shifting as lowering the top tax rate from 70 to 28 percent, or the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the sum of his feats may end up as equally revolutionary — and possibly could even end up saving the planet from the worst of the climate crisis.

On the other hand, Obama’s failure to sell his accomplishments could end up costing him much of his legacy, should a Republican sweep into office determined to uninsure millions, unleash Wall Street’s most destructive instincts, and supersize carbon pollution.

The historic nature of Obama’s presidency and even his election are now so politicized that attempting to explicate them risks seeming oblivious to the real economic troubles that still vex us, or alienating liberals who despise incrementalism, or feeding the angst of the hard right that takes even his existence as an insult.

But if there’s ever a time to stop and appreciate the singular presidency we’re all living through, it’s now. Here are five hidden successes that Mike Grunwald has revealed.

1. Kicking the big banks out of the student loan business.
This first success is the most forgotten because it was buried in the same bill that gave us the Affordable Care Act. By taking over the student loan program and kicking out Sallie Mae and other private lenders who raked in enormous fees without the risk such loans usually entail, it was the only “government takeover” Obama actually signed into law. “The bill then diverted the budget savings into a $36 billion expansion of Pell Grants for low-income undergraduates, plus an unheralded but extraordinary student-debt relief effort that is now quietly transferring the burden of college loans from struggling borrowers to taxpayers,” Grunwald writes.

2. Shrinking health care cost inflation and saving us billions.
A big complaint from from the left during the passage of the Affordable Care Act was that the law doesn’t regulate the health industry sufficiently to contain costs. Industry profits and insurance offerings were closely regulated — eliminating, for instance, co-pays for “quit-smoking programs, birth control pills, certain cancer screenings and other preventive care” — but the bill leaned more on trying to control the growth of health care spending by including “every cost-control idea in circulation.” Yet the result has been better than the law’s proponents expected. “Health care is still getting more expensive, but since 2010, the growth rate has slowed so drastically that the Congressional Budget Office has slashed its projection for government health spending in 2020 by $175 billion,” Grunwald writes. “That’s enough to fund the Navy for a year, or the EPA for two decades.” This is the kind of reform that makes traditional Medicare sustainable, which is exactly why Republicans in Congress just voted to repeal it again.

3. Taking on two of our leading causes of preventable death.
You probably know about the Administration’s efforts — led by the First Lady — to take on childhood obesity directly with school lunches and more indirectly by trying to create a culture of nutrition and exercise. But one major victory the Obama Administration scored in a decades-long effort to prioritize health over profits was the FDA taking over the regulation of the tobacco industry. “I remember President Bill Clinton crusading for the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco, but I somehow missed that Obama finally made it happen,” Grunwald writes.

4. Clamping down on too-big-to-fail banks and putting government to work for consumers.
Just as many on the left will forever compare Obamacare unfavorably to single-payer, many wanted to see the big banks broken up. Instead, the president went with policies that are almost impossible to explain without drool-inducing PowerPoints but have achieved many of the goals that progressives hoped to see from reform. Grunwald says that “the bottom line is that financial behemoths no longer enjoy much of a ‘too-big-to-fail subsidy.'” But even more importantly, there is now an independent government agency designed to protect the borrowers who suffered the most during the financial crisis. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Grunwald writes, “is most influential new regulatory agency since the EPA, already collecting more than $10 billion in fines from financial players that used to enjoy relative impunity.” And guess what would be one of the very first thing Republicans would eliminate.

5. Transforming the way we produce energy.
There’s no issue that divides the two political parties more than the need to fight climate change: One wants to reduce carbon pollution while the other wants to increase it. For seven years, Obama has driven us toward reduction. First, there was the Stimulus, which “transformed the U.S. clean-energy sector, blasting an astonishing $90 billion into renewables and other long-neglected green priorities, while birthing a new research agency called ARPA-E.” Then through regulation where with just one rule he’s backed, “for commercial air conditioners, will singlehandedly reduce U.S. energy use by 1 percent.” By thrusting us to the point that renewables can compete with its dirtier alternatives on cost alone, this most important advancement of the Obama era may be one change that may irreversible. But be assured, that any Republican president would do his best to set us back on highway to climate catastrophe.

U.S. President Barack Obama smiles as he holds his end of the year news conference at the White House in Washington December 18, 2015. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Antonin Scalia Defeated — By Antonin Scalia

Antonin Scalia Defeated — By Antonin Scalia

Justice Antonin Scalia did not simply lose today’s key ruling on the federal health insurance subsidies for the Affordable Care Act — he had his own previous arguments turned against him.

The majority opinion issued today, written principally by Chief Justice John Roberts — whose crucial vote previously upheld Obamacare back in 2012 — illustrated the idea of the insurance subsidies being an integral part of health care reform itself.

And the absurdity of just striking out subsidies for people living in states with federally run exchanges — as Scalia and his fellow dissenters insisted had to be done under the law — was illustrated by citing… Antonin Scalia, from his earlier efforts to stamp out health care reform.

It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner. See National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 […] (SCALIA, KENNEDY, THOMAS, and ALITO, JJ., dissenting) […] (“Without the federal subsidies . . . the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended and may not operate at all.”).

That is, Roberts and company cited the dissent in the first major Obamacare case, from 2012, when the dissenters — Scalia being one of them — tried to say that pretty much each every single facet of the Affordable Care Act was not only wrong but unconstitutional, and that they interlocked so completely that by striking down even one of them, the entire Act would have to fall.

As a political staffer friend, who is a trained lawyer (though not currently practicing), tells me: “The problem with results-oriented jurisprudence is it makes hypocrisy easy to spot.”

The full paragraph in that original dissent is as follows:

In the absence of federal subsidies to purchasers, insurance companies will have little incentive to sell insurance on the exchanges. Under the ACA’s scheme, few, if any, individuals would want to buy individual insurance policies outside of an exchange, because federal subsidies would be unavailable outside of an exchange. Difficulty in attracting individuals outside of the exchange would in turn motivate insurers to enter exchanges, despite the exchanges’ onerous regulations. […] That system of incentives collapses if the federal subsidies are invalidated. Without the federal subsidies, individuals would lose the main incentive to purchase insurance inside the exchanges, and some insurers may be unwilling to offer insurance inside of exchanges. With fewer buyers and even fewer sellers, the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended and may not operate at all.