Tag: medicare for all
Joe Biden

Biden’s Real Health Care Reform Is Far Better Than Trump’s Imaginary Plan

Health care policy has been a major issue for a long time. It played a big role in Barack Obama's 2008 election victory, his entire presidency and the 2010 GOP takeover of the House of Representatives. Repealing Obamacare was a Republican priority before and after Donald Trump became president. The debate on "Medicare for All" dominated the 2020 Democratic primaries.

Now, in the middle of the nation's worst pandemic in 100 years, you would think health care policy would be the object of obsession among politicians and voters. Instead, the issue has gone missing.

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Votes Do Matter, Bernie

Votes Do Matter, Bernie

If Bernie Sanders were amassing a nearly insurmountable lead in the delegate counts, I have little doubt that he would be saying to Joe Biden: “Democrats have spoken. Time to drop out and help the team.”

But doing what he expects of others is not Bernie’s way. As in the past, he can stay in, waving the implied threat that not adopting his program might cause his base to stay home in November. The impolite word is “extortion,” which Sanders launders with baloney claims that he is, somehow, actually winning.

My favorite is “We are winning the generational debate.” Sanders said this right after Joe Biden crushed him in Super Tuesday II. Sanders had just lost his working-class firewall of Michigan, plus Missouri, Mississippi, Idaho and even Sanders-friendly Washington. (He won only North Dakota.)

By “generational debate,” Sanders meant he was prevailing among younger voters, which is true. But he is apparently not doing well among young nonvoters, who, contrary to the campaign’s claims, are not showing up in vast numbers to support him.

Camp Bernie fantasizes that young people’s votes count more than old people’s votes. For demographic reasons, Sanders was expected to lose Florida and Arizona. But Biden bested him by nearly 40(!) percentage points in Florida — and at a time when the coronavirus is scaring a lot of elderly voters away from the polls.

The Sanders campaign continually boasts that it is winning the small-donations race. “We’re especially proud that of the more than 2 million donations we received this month, over 1.4 million were from voters in states that vote on Super Tuesday,” Faiz Shakir, Sanders’ campaign manager, said at the start of March.

Sanders’ ability to raise large sums in small quantities is genuinely impressive. And it follows that the Vermonter would not be beholden to big-money interests. But dollars are not votes. Votes are something Americans cast free of charge — and not by writing checks, whatever the size. Votes determine the winner.

Two days later, Super Tuesday happened. After greatly outspending Biden, Sanders lost 10 of the 14 states including Texas and Virginia. He did grab the biggest prize, California, though by fewer than 7 percentage points. Vermont’s neighbors, Massachusetts and Maine, went for Biden.

After losing badly on Super Tuesday II, Sanders vowed not to end his campaign. He explained, “Poll after poll, including exit polls, show that a strong majority of the American people support our progressive agenda.”

It’s a cliche but true that the only poll that matters is the one on Election Day. But it’s not hard to “win” a poll if you word it in your favor. Sanders often cites the polls finding that most Americans like the idea of his “Medicare for All.” Other polls, however, show that even more Americans object to losing their private coverage, which his proposal would ban. How do you explain that discrepancy? Marketing.

What Sanders calls Medicare for All is not Medicare. It’s a Canadian-style single-payer system. However one feels about the Canadian system, the fact remains that Canada forbids people from buying private coverage for services included in the government plan. Medicare is a mixed-payer program combining government insurance with a good deal of regulated private coverage.

To we who have followed the health care battles over the years, Biden’s proposals to expand government’s role is plenty progressive. But if you buy into Sanders’ contention that the coronavirus pandemic will drive people toward his more radical ideas, you have to ask yourself: Why does Sanders lose by progressively bigger margins as this virus rampages?

It’s those darn voters. They get in the way every time.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Health Care Profiteers Are Marketing Chicken Manure

Health Care Profiteers Are Marketing Chicken Manure

When grassroots groups rise up against the corporate establishment trying to win some specific progressive change for the common good, the odds against them can seem daunting. As an old saying puts it: Where there’s a will … there are 1,000 won’ts.

Those won’ts tend to be moneyed powers making a killing from the status quo, so they’re dead set against any change. Such has certainly been the case in the decadeslong political struggle to ensure that every man, woman and child in our country gets decent health care as a human right. Today, even though we Americans pay by far the highest price for health care, most people are denied that right by our country’s profiteering, corporate-run medical industry, which treats care as a privileged commodity.

So many families are left out and maltreated by this dysfunctional system that more than 70 percent of Americans (including a majority of Republicans) now support replacing it with a “Medicare for All” publicly financed system that provides full health coverage for everyone, even as it saves us money.

So here come 1,000 screaming won’ts, rushing out to crush the people’s will. Such usual clusters of far-right plutocratic power as the Koch brothers’ billionaire club, Karl Rove’s political monkey wrenchers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce clique of giant corporations have deployed their forces. But the present system is so bad, and public support for Medicare for All has grown so large so fast, that the usual corporate dismissal of such ideas wasn’t working, spooking the profiteers.

Time for a powerhouse front group! Two years ago, the corporate won’ts met secretly in downtown Washington to set up an industrywide PR/lobbying juggernaut, giving it the stealth name of Partnership for America’s Health Care Future. Of course, what they care about is the future of their rip-off profits, and they’ve committed hundreds of millions of dollars and hired an army of more than 200 lobbyists to pound the public and Congress with a nuclear level of propaganda and raw political deceit.

This Partnership of Profiteers is Washington politics at its worst — a handful of cynical self-interests using cloaks, dark money and lies to rig the system for corporate profits at the expense of human health and political morality.

As former President Lyndon Johnson used to say about special interests trying to get his support to pass some blatantly self-serving legislation: “I may not know much, but I do know the difference between chicken s—- and chicken salad.”

Yet, chicken manure is all that the corporate health complex has to work with as it frantically tries to defend its current system of mass malpractice. After all, as most Americans have learned the hard way, the corporatized “care” of profiteering insurance giants, Big Pharma and hospital chains grossly overcharge us while constantly trying to shortchange or outright deny care to millions of our families.

So, unable to win public support on their own merit, the corporatists and their hired political hacks are going all out to continue their profit gouging and keep control of America’s dysfunctional system. They’re running a multimillion-dollar PR and lobbying campaign of lies to trash and kill all reforms that would deliver quality, comprehensive care to everyone , at far less cost than they can deliver.

The profiteers masquerading as a Partnership for America’s Health Care Future warn ominously that such reforms as Medicare for All and a public option for health insurance would take away people’s “choice” and their “control” over health care.

Hello … we presently have no choice or control. Our “care” is managed by a handful of drug and hospital monopolists whose primary objective is not improving our health but fattening their profits. And the undeniable, ugly truth is that the “Partnership” fattens its profits by shortchanging our care.

That’s one reason the American Medical Association and others are dropping out of the “Partnership’s” political front. Honest health care practitioners don’t want to be part of its fraud and its chicken manure PR campaign.

Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

Health Insurance Whistleblower Reveals How Industry Will Attack Warren’s New Plan

Health Insurance Whistleblower Reveals How Industry Will Attack Warren’s New Plan

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Now that we’ve seen Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan to pay for Medicare for All without raising taxes on the middle class, let me tell you what is happening in Washington.

Forbes Tate, the Washington-based PR firm hired by big insurance, drug and hospital companies to create and run a front group called the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, will already have convened an urgent conference call with its clients to go over Warren’s plan and begin implementing a strategy to attack it. A big part of that strategy will be to reach out to reliable industry allies to do the dirty work.

One of those allies is likely to be the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a supposedly nonpartisan organization that issued a widely publicized report on October 28 insisting that, as Axios reported in its analysis of the report, “the middle class would be forced to shoulder some of the burden” of financing Medicare for All.

The wisdom put forward by Washington pundits and think tanks like CRFB has been that improving and expanding Medicare to cover everybody, as both Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders advocate, can’t be done without a significant tax hike on middle-income earners.

But much to the surprise of the insurance industry and its allies, Warren has just unveiled a plan that would not increase taxes on the middle class—in fact, it would slash what average Americans spend on health care and even reduce what the nation’s employers pay to subsidize health insurance for their workers. And Warren found that upon a closer look, there is enough money concentrated in the hands of the rich and corporations to finance a large chunk of Medicare for All.

The health insurance industry believed it was marching Warren into a trap, and now they’re scrambling to come up with a response to preserve their treasured but failing cash cow: the employer-based health insurance system.

The advocates of preserving the U.S. employer-based system—most notably America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and Forbes Tate’s Partnership, of which AHIP is a member—will be forced to quickly come up with new talking points.

As the former head of corporate communications for Cigna, one of AHIP’s biggest members, and a former member of AHIP’s strategic communications committee, I can assure you that health insurers will find Warren’s plan terrifying because it will force their employer customers to question the need for, the “value proposition” of, private health insurers.

Even before Warren rolled out her plan, I had heard from employers all across the country that the current system no longer works for them, that it simply is no longer economically sustainable for either them or their employees.

Employers of all sizes have woken up to the reality that private insurers cannot and do not want to control ever-escalating health care costs. They are fed up with being hit year after year with double-digit premium increases and having to push their workers into high-deductible plans.

Their fury has been building for years as they have seen bigger and bigger hits to their bottom lines because of an expense they have little control over—the cost of providing coverage to their workforce. As the Kaiser Family Foundation has documented, over the past two decades, the cost of an employer-sponsored family plan has soared from $5,791 (in 1999) to $20,576 (in 2019).

As those premiums have gone up, employers have had to ask employees not only to pay an ever-increasing percentage of those premiums, but they have also reluctantly had to move more of them into high-deductible plans—to the point that, according to the Commonwealth Fund, “a quarter of working-age adults with job-based coverage had such high out-of-pocket costs and deductibles relative to their income that they were effectively underinsured.” That means that even though they and their employees are paying more for their coverage, the value of that coverage is decreasing.

Plus, workers are becoming increasingly aware that employer-sponsored coverage is anything but secure. They know that if they lose their jobs, they also lose their employer-sponsored health insurance. And they are also becoming increasingly aware that, unlike Medicare, private insurers are limiting their choice of doctors and hospitals.

Despite all that, we can expect the insurance industry to press its allies into service to attack Warren’s plan.

In my old job at Cigna, I worked with many organizations that agreed to carry health insurers’ water whenever the status quo was under threat. Expect groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (to which AHIP quietly funneled $100 million ten years ago in an effort to kill what became the Affordable Care Act), the National Federation of Independent Business (which I worked with in the late ’90s to kill the Patients’ Bill of Rights), and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a longtime ally, to come out swinging against Warren’s plan.

It is especially notable that NAM is a member of the Partnership, and it also has a vested interest in protecting private insurers despite the challenges its members are facing with rising premiums and health care costs. NAM has recently jumped into the health insurance business with UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s biggest private health insurer. They have teamed up to sell association health plans to employers who want to offer coverage to workers that is exempt from the protections provided under the Affordable Care Act (and consequently less comprehensive and valuable).

We can also expect the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget to weigh in again. That is another organization I worked with in my old job. That’s because the CRFP’s longtime president and CEO, Carol Cox Wait, was also a longtime member of the Cigna board of directors. Wait is still a CRFP directoras is my former colleague William Hoagland, who was Cigna’s chief lobbyist in Washington when I was head of corporate communications. We worked hand in glove.

Wait made millions of dollars during her 16 years on the Cigna board (1995-2011). Cigna pays its directors very well. In 2011 alone, according to Cigna’s annual report and proxy statement, the company paid her $256,884 for her board service. That’s a substantial amount of money, but Cigna also gave her thousands of shares of the company’s stock while she was a director. When she retired on December 31, 2011, she held 49,304 shares of Cigna stock, which at the time was valued at $2,070,768. Since then the share price has more than quadrupled. Those shares today would be worth more than $8 million.

Being a peer of mine, Hoagland also undoubtedly was a highly compensated Cigna employee, and he likely would have received a significant part of his overall compensation in stock grants and stock options.

So the next time you hear the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget blast Medicare for All, know that at least two of its board members most likely have a financial interest in keeping private insurance companies in control of our health care system.

And remember groups that are likely to come to the defense of the employer-based insurance system that Warren wants to dramatically reform, like the Chamber of Commerce, may (again) be receiving tens of millions of dollars from industry.

Wendell Potter is the former vice president of corporate communications at Cigna. A health insurance industry whistleblower, he is now president of Business for Medicare for All and author of bestselling books Deadly Spin and Nation on the Take.