I have a few 1%er friends, at the very low end of the 1%, but there they are. When it comes to health care and insurance, their standard objection to socialized medicine (or whatever you want to call taking it out of the private sector and making it a public right) is “I pay for my own insurance. I can pay for my own medical care. Why should I be forced to pay for someone else, much less, someone else who is not taking good care of their own health?”
They have a point. If my neighbor does not change the oil in his car and rotate his tires, why should anyone but he be responsible for the blown engine or bald tires?
In keeping with the car analogy, we’re all Ferraris at the moment. One hundred and twenty years ago we were all bicycles. What I mean by this is one hundred and twenty years ago, the average American spend about $100 a year on medical care. Today, that figure is over $8,000. What happened? Why so little then and so much now? The answer is simple. Back then, there was little to spend money on. Most modern day marvels, from vascular repair to anesthesia and antibiotics were not yet discovered. Today we can transplant organs, operate on beating hearts, and so much more and it’s all so much more expensive.
The 1%er might say to this, “Okay, so what? I can afford to repair my Ferrari but why should I pay to fix your Ferrari?”- excellent question.
Back in the 1920’s hospitals had a lot of empty beds. Poor people could not afford them and there were not enough sick and injured rich people to fill the beds. Hospitals were in danger of closing their doors which means no hospitals for the poor who could not pay and none for the rich who could pay. It was at this time that hospitals began selling insurance to people so that they would have a larger population to draw from, stay in business, and be able to treat the rich too. If not for this, hospitals in the USA would be as scarce as Ferrari dealerships. There are 38 Ferrari dealerships in the USA, providing sales and service to the number of American citizens who can afford a Ferrari. There slightly more than 5,500 hospitals in the USA.
Each year, as wages stagnate and the cost of medical care rises, more and more Americans are unable to afford to pay for health care/health insurance. More and more of us can no longer afford to keep our local Ferrari dealership open. This means, to the 1%, that even if they can afford a Ferrari on their own, the odds of finding one nearby, with the parts and a qualified technician, will be as good as breaking down in any random town in the USA and getting towed to a local Ferrari dealer within minutes.
So your plan is to put your 1% friends to sleep and then to pass single payer?
Screw the 1%. They can take care of themselves. How about us 99 % ?
Trump Scare is Robin Hood in reverse. It steals from the poor to make the obscene rich even richer.
Trump Care is like Trump University, but instead of being conned out of thousands of dollars for a worthless degree, you die.
Don’t most one-percenters own businesses which involve paying employees and providing benefits? I’ve long thought these people should be first in line to support single-payer because it would relieve them of the burden of providing health insurance for their employees.
They are first in line to having their employees pay a greater and greater share of the insurance costs and then dropping them entirely.
My point is that would all be moot with single-payer and the employers wouldn’t have to pay any of it anyway.
Full stop.
They just answered their own question: if they already pay for insurance, they are already paying for someone else. The last payment they made to their insurance went DIRECTLY to somebody elses medical care. Later on, when they get sick and have to visit the doctor, that MD is going to get paid… wait for it… by someone else. Health insurance is not banking. It’s not a rainy day fund. It’s paying for todays cure, for someone else, in the certain knowledge that they’ll pay for yours when you need it.
Of course, these objections might be valid if they pay any and all medical costs, out of pocket…. which they probably could… but then they would be at risk of getting well and truly gouged by the doctors… (“He got out of medical school and opened up a practice specialising in the diseases of the very rich…” Tom Lehrer) Which should, if they get angry at the notion of subsidizing someone else, anger them even more so… unless they’re willing to straight up admit that they simply don’t like the poor.
So, they can pay what everybody else pays, as part of the system everybody else pays into. Or they can pay more than everybody else for the sake of a dubious fairness…
But they only want to pay for others who are paying in….
And, Lo, the individual mandate was born…
The individual mandate to buy insurance from a private company in order to protect that private company from the mandate to cover pre-existing conditions originated in a right wing think tank in its efforts to preserve health care as a profit opportunity for the 1% and not as human right for all citizens.
Republicans have a woeful unwillingness to separate dogma from realism. They have an essentially religious attachment to their failed dogma. They join the ranks of certain religious fanatics who view real, concrete, and documented evidence of dogma failures as “tests” of their “faith” — the more compelling the evidence, the more resolute their denial.
Even Republicans have sort-of (at least until Mr. Trump) understood that governments are better at national defense than private industry. They have therefore historically been receptive to significant government investment in national defense (especially since many of their most significant contributors profit handsomely from those investments).
Sadly, they simply deny decades of evidence about some other areas. The rest of the world has known, for decades, that government is better than private industry at the following:
– Education
– Passenger rail transportation
– Health care
This essentially religious refusal to confront reality, and to instead become increasingly more fervent in denial, is deadly to our form of government.
We survived for several centuries in no small part because our firewalls between church and state helped keep such religiosity separated from government. It is no accident that the same political movement that so aggressively pursues this insanity has been joined at the waist to the extremist religious right for generations.
It is almost as if the religious and superstitious impulses of our society that we were once focused on — and perhaps therefore contained by — our religious institutions have now metastasized into our society at large. We see Republicans treating the US Constitution as holy writ, literally correct and infallible. We see Republicans rejecting compelling evidence of climate change. Now, the same religiosity is being targeted at health care and — if enacted — will be a historic assault on our most vulnerable residents.
All wrapped in the cross-and-flag of “God and Country”.
It is this magical and — yes — religious thinking that we must change.
Try the basic business argument for it. Health coverage has become a massive cost center inside American business. Not only are the benefits expensive, but you have to hire armies of benefits admins just to sort through the whole mess. It eats up a ridiculous amount of time and effort that could be going to the things that make you money. Also, people get so worked up over insufficient coverage and a system no one understands that it makes them less productive.
On top of that, if everyone just had health coverage no matter what, it would be a lot easier to attract talent, and it would encourage more entrepreneurship. Our current system stifles the ability of businesses to grow and pursue new opportunities.
Honestly, I’ve never understood why the business-wing on the right thinks putting employers on the hook for health benefits is a good idea. Seems like the sort of unfunded mandate on the private sector they should hate.
All of this. Forever. Why.