Blog For Iowa

John Oliver explains it here during his “Last Week With John Oliver.” The video is 30 minutes long, but does have some very important messages. The most important message is that the badly misnamed “Medicare Advantage” is neither Medicare nor does it have any advantages:

Of special note to pay attention to on this video is that at 23 minutes Oliver discusses how once you are in Medicare Advantage (let’s call it MA from here on out because I hate to do anything that would indicate that this product is Medicare or an advantage) it is hard to return to real Medicare.

Also of note is that Oliver does a good summary starting around the 27th minute. In America these days it seems that we can only get real news from comedians.

While we are on the subject of how gawd-awfully broken America’s health system is, I would like to say this would be a great time for Democrats to use the occasion of the humongous and devastating rises in health care premiums to point out how Democrats do have an incredibly better idea for health care.

Now is the time for Democrats across the board to come out for universal health care and against the most corrupt and unworkable and unreliable health care non-system that ever existed. If there are such things as devils, they must have designed  America’s health care system. We are the only country where a health emergency can bankrupt us.

Folks, Republicans under Trump and previous awful leadership have fucked up every system we have. And perhaps the most fucked up of all is health care. There is no reason why Americans should have to choose between health care premiums and food but they have to under our system.

There is no reason why Americans should live in pain, avoiding medical visits because they can’t afford them or die from lack of health care. Yet that is how our system is set up. As we all know, Americans across the country are dropping their health care coverage so that billionaires can enjoy huge tax cuts. Is that morally right, because it is what we are doing.

In his book author Timothy Faust discusses how single payer health care could go a long ways toward solving some of the deepest problems in the country. An excerpt from the Physicians for a National Health Policy website:

My answer begins with single-payer. Single-payer won’t solve all of the problems we’ve talked about in the previous section of this book. It won’t even solve most of them: it won’t build the houses, it won’t feed the people, it won’t bring jobs or money back to rural areas. But that’s all right, in a sense— no program can, not all at once. What single-payer can do, I believe, is serve as a ladder we can climb, all together, into a better world. A properly designed single-payer program is one titanic step toward making people safe in their own homes, in their own bodies. It is a reprieve from our continual fucking-over by the structure and stricture of private insurance. And it is a method of finally demanding accountability from a state that permits (or even encourages) the sins that cause mass suffering—and the medical inequities they produce.

It’s not a hard sell. Single-payer isn’t that complicated (the real complicated shit is the various bureaucratic coping mechanisms invented to respond to the inadequacies of private insurance!) and most people like it already. More people will be drawn to it once they learn what it means and how it fits into the nooks and crannies of their lives. Most doctors and nurses like it, both because they’ve seen the devastating consequences of uninsurance among their patients and because they’d like to avoid the grating bureaucracy of trying to get paid by insurance companies.

The people who tend not to like single-payer are people who wouldn’t like anything that didn’t make them money: the insurance companies it would replace, plus the pharmaceutical, device, and hospital CEOs whose profits might be cut into by the rise of a larger, stronger, payer. Then there’s the powerful people who generally benefit from human suffering: the abusive boss who wants to make sure you can’t quit your job; the abusive husband who wants to make sure you can’t quit your relationship; the CEO who enjoys being able to cut benefits while knowing his workers can’t strike for fear of losing insurance; the lizardlike politicians who find it useful to first advance policies that let rich people plunder their districts, then blame poor people, people with disabilities, and people of color for the resulting scarcity.

These problems are not new in America. We’ve been suffering needlessly for generations. We continue this suffering because, at every conceivable opportunity, our politicians, our policy-makers, the CEOs who mine us for profit—have decided to pursue moderate, subdued, pragmatic, and useless policies. They have had every opportunity to help and have refused. They must be left behind. They’ve started coming out of the woodwork, and they’ll continue to do so for the next few years. They’ll have “responsible solutions” for “new American healthcare.” They’ll smile and go on TV and say they’re very concerned about all these problems whose structural causes they, personally, have benefited from. They will reach out to take our hands, tenderly and piously, and whisper, “This really is the best we can do right now,” as they jam them in the garbage disposal. So they’re out.

We will have to turn to each other.

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I don’t think America has ever seen a time when there has been such a blatant illustration of how policies so heinously affect those of us not in the top 10%. Nor has there ever been a time where the desire for change among many fronts has ever been stronger. This is a great time for the people to stand up and say “We can, we must, do better!”