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Showing posts with label healthcare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label healthcare. Show all posts


As I sit here today, looking at a world rocked by the COVID-19 crisis and thinking about the vast sums of money needed to address it, I find myself wondering what it would’ve been like had we had even one trillion dollars to spend on something a few years ago.

What might the world be like now, if four or five years ago we had had $1 trillion to spend on the global climate change crisis? What would have happened if we had $1 trillion for the educational crisis in America? If a trillion dollars had been put towards ending America’s homelessness crisis, what could we have achieved? What about the hunger crisis? Could a trillion dollars have solved with that? America faces, and has faced for many years now, a crisis of structural inequality, income inequality, wealth inequality, and inequality of opportunities. I am betting that if $1 trillion had been used to solve America’s inequality crisis, we could probably have gone a long way towards addressing it. What about $1 trillion to help solve the healthcare crisis? A trillion dollars to build hospitals, buyout insurance companies, and solve any and all other problems associated with a single-payer health care system. Looking globally, America could’ve taken $1 trillion to completely eliminate the world’s refugee problems. Pick the disease or illness of your choice; now imagine $1 trillion focused on solving it. Malaria? Cancer? Infectious diseases? I don’t know, maybe $1 trillion could’ve bought solutions to all three.

Four or five years ago we “did not have” $1 trillion to spend on any of these crises. But crises they were, and crises they continue to be. [Note: Yes, I understand that the government neither has nor doesn’t have any given amount of money. We are not on the gold standard – we don’t have to get more gold in order to print more money. Budgetary deficits of the federal government are not the same thing as household borrowing. The federal government doesn't need to get money from somewhere, it just creates it out of thin air (really!) The act of printing money, or not printing money, effects the money supply. That, plus the velocity of money, impacts inflation or deflation. Four or five years ago the government could have printed a trillion dollars to use on anything it (we) wanted. The decision whether or not to create money was dictated by monetary policy, not by the need to address specific issues.]

The pandemic crisis has been a body slam to America and the world. Yes, America had to spend several trillion dollars keeping the economy together, with trillions more yet to come. We had to provide safety nets for people losing their jobs, facing the loss of a home, and so forth, as well as businesses going under and the resultant collapse of the economy. The pandemic had to be dealt with right now, period. It couldn’t wait. The trillions had to be spent, and they had to be spent right now. But why did we have to wait for a crisis that hits us in the face to spend money on serious problems? 

Meanwhile, all the crises listed above, and more, are slowly destroying our lives. These crises slowly impoverish hungry people, homeless people, people who cannot get an education, and people who are held back in life due to our crisis of structural inequality. Healthcare in this country is a crisis. But clearly we’re not going to fix it until people are lying dead in the streets for want of medical care. Most of the world has known for ages that climate change is a crisis. Yet Americans are barely waking up to the ways that climate change is ruining our way of life and actively killing people, now, not some time in the dim future. How obvious must it be that climate change is a crisis that has to be addressed right now, before people in America are willing to spend the trillions of dollars needed to address it, just as we are spending trillions to manage the effects of COVID-19.

These slow crises lack immediacy, so they are ignored. But they cant be ignored by the people they are killing. If we can spend trillions on our response to the COVID pandemic, then we can spend serious money tackling our other crises too.



Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on the case of Trump v. Pennsylvania. The court decided in favor of Trump, concluding that employers have broad religious and moral exemptions from the mandate that health insurance provided to their workers include coverage for birth control. Soon the court, minus Justice Ginsberg, may rule on other aspects of ACA potentially dooming that legislation.

But that is not what I want to talk about. Every time questions are raised related to health insurance provided by corporations, I am reminded of something my dad used to say. He was very conservative and voted the straight republican ticket for most of his life. [He voted Republican up until tRump. He couldn’t bring himself to vote for a man he called an “unqualified moron”, regardless of party loyalty.] He owned a small specialty chemical business. Over the years he had anywhere from 3 employees (in the earliest days), to 50 or 60 at the company’s peak.

Every time the issue of health insurance came up, American business would vigorously declare that the government should stay out of it. My father would shake his head and growl, “What, are they nuts?” He would say things like, “I am in the chemical business. I am not in the insurance business. I don’t know health insurance, and I don’t want to have to provide it to my employees.” He would ask, “Why do these companies want to deal with this mishegas? They make cars, or sell shoes, or fly airplanes. That’s what they should do!” He would go on, “Every year I have to read through all these fucking insurance riders and choose the best insurance for my people. What if I make a mistake? I lie awake at night worrying about what would happen if I chose a bad insurance plan and an employee suffers.” [He really was a good employer in spite of his gruffness and conservative nature.] “If the government wants to take over health insurance, I say ‘Please! Please do!’ What makes these companies want to deal with this nonsense. Let the government take it over! Please.”

Of course, it was a rhetorical question. He knew why, and I do too. The vast majority of America’s major corporations are run by arch conservatives who want the government to tax as little as possible, and provide as few services as possible. They also want their employees to be stuck in their jobs due to the need for insurance. Furthermore, large corporations can carry the cost of human resources departments that handle getting, maintaining, and managing healthcare policies. It’s no skin off the back of the people at the top to have their businesses providing healthcare insurance to their employees.

But life would be so much easier for everyone if we just had universal healthcare. Corporations that aren’t in the healthcare industry could focus on their core competency, whatever that might be. For companies with religious or moral objections to certain healthcare options, the issue becomes moot. Also, companies can stop playing stupid games such as making sure that everyone is part-time, or a consultant, etc. to avoid having to provide benefits (of which insurance is far and away the most expensive.) Meanwhile, companies use health insurance as a way to handcuff their employees to their jobs. But, I have to ask, do they really want employees that are only there because of the health insurance benefit? I’ve got to believe that someone clocking in every day solely for the health care is unlikely to be a company’s dedicated performer! Let them go, taking their government provided health insurance with them, and bring in someone else who is truly invested in the work. Then the employee, now freed from the need for employer sponsored healthcare, can find another job that better suits their needs, aptitudes, and desires. Everyone wins - the worker, the employers on both side of the move, and the economy. Everyone.

Oh, and another benefit of a single-payer system: all Americans can get the healthcare they need without going bankrupt. Not having your company situated in a country filled with the sick, dying, and bankrupt, has got to be worth something. And the net cost for American businesses will be almost nothing. If business stopped objecting and just let the government take over providing health care in this country, they could relieve themselves of all the overhead of providing it themselves. Sure, their taxes would probably go up, but, that tax burden would be spread across all taxpayers. I am hard pressed to believe that the portion contributed by corporate taxes would be greater than the cost employers already bear providing private health insurance. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.

So, please, can we stop litigating who pays for what, when, and how, and just give the human beings that live in American healthcare already? Geesh.