THE MEDICAL INDUSTRY THAT IS BREAKING US..
“American workers’ health insurance premiums and deductibles continued to tick upward in 2018, outpacing wage growth and inflation, according to a new national survey of employers.
The increases extend a long-running trend that is pinching workers and their families, and fueling widespread anxiety about medical costs.
More than a quarter of all workers with health coverage now have a deductible of at least $2,000 for single coverage, the survey by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation found.” Sacramento Bee…
And so the ACA, now hamstrung by Republican sabotage can no longer keep premium prices down. The government has been taken out of it, leaving the “consumer” again at the mercy of the insurance companies.
The insurance industry cunningly used the Republican Party to attack the ACA, as the premium reducing vehicle it was, although flawed by what it wasn’t, a single payer system like Medicare that shared the costs of health care through a person’s working lifetime. Moreover what it did do somewhat was to make the government an umpire to decide what was a reasonable charge, but that was the first thing the Republicans attacked.
Why? Why would they gut health care that for a time actually put pressure on the monster we call health care industry to get under control? Because even the hint that the huge cookie jar that is health care (for the rich and well born) would be messed with.
Look health care is NOT an industry. It is not a assembly line, and we are not consumers. I hate that term.
It is an economic term that depicts people like small birds, crying for food as their mother shoves half digested food down their throats.
WE ARE NOT CONSUMERS
We are human beings, biological creatures who get sick.
And illness is NOT an industry, it is something that needs to be cured or treated.
You don’t cure or treat an automobile engine do you, or a jet airplane or steel? Those are all PRODUCTS OF MANUFACTURING….a human being is not a product of manufacturing.
This false analogy, that business types loves to use, is on purpose a guise to get us to think manufacturing and inevitably profit. Profit is the goal of business and manufacturing; and the more profit the better. We have even been conned by a Supreme Court decision to believe that corporations are individual people.
Really, did you go to Exxon’s birthday party, did you hear that Standard Oil and PG&E are having an affair, while their son Wal-Mart in in college, imagine.
Yes this is nuts.
But it is an analogy and comparative way of thinking that is bankrupting you!
Why? Because the business analogy applied to medical insurance and the medical “industry” has resulted in the most expensive medical system in the galaxy. That’s right the galaxy!
How so?
Well it started after WWII when the world was in shambles and so were nation’s health care systems.
Most of the European countries had socialized medicine already, but the destruction of the war meant that they no longer could support any kind of profit making health care system.
So they adopted, in the ruins of their countries, a single payer system or a socialized system, that saw medical diagnosis and treatment for what it is; an essential human service NOT a risk or a manufactured product.
This basic difference in the approach to health care, which by the way was virtually non-existent in the most damaged countries (2.5 million Germans died from 1945 to 1948 from lack of health care), means most of the advanced nations NOW have medical care systems that actually work; and don’t bankrupt its citizens.
The United States that had won the war basically as the “arsenal of democracy” was so enamored with production, especially out of control over-production (remember American Industry was taking the place of Great Britain, and Russians ruined industries) , that over production was ALWAYS a good thing.
And there was no way it would or could slow down. So the manufacturing sector, so impressed with the things it had done to literally outproduce the Axis to death, kept it up. The production model looked desperately for areas to continue its war caused efficiencies and turned to…..health care.
Now health care had been totally privatized before the war. Prices and costs were manageable for everyone. If you could not pay, they wrote it off. However, the scope of what health care could “cure” was small, polio still killed thousands, cancer was a death sentence, and the nation watched helplessly as heart disease killed FDR…
In those days long term care did not exist. Disease just killed you, so health care meant a yearly physical and good luck. DEAD PEOPLE ARE NOT COSTLY TO A HEALTH CARE SYSTEM….
But the war, like all wars, had seen a dramatic uptick in medical care. Did you know that that the Civil War caused sanitary practices to be adopted as doctors who hacked off legs like we cut our nails, found out that washing your hands and using drugs to knock the patient out, made it safer and increased survivability of wounded soldiers?
WWII saw the largest survival rate of wounded soldiers in mankind’s history. And, it saw the growth of doctors and nurses, X-rays, and a cure for polio as just the start of a medical care revolution that transformed the world, greatly increased life spans; etc.
Ironically the war, that killed 55,000,000, indirectly and dramatically increased life spans.
For example,the infrastructure of Europe was simply destroyed. As the infrastructure was rebuilt, water treatment was greatly improved.
The largest single killer of people was bad water and the war destroyed those antiquated systems. The rebuilding of these system dramatically increased life spans.
American urban specialists, through the Marshall Plan, brought with them to Europe the secret to long life, clean water. And Paris and London and even Berlin saw the development of water sanitation that eventually saved millions of lives.
And Europe was destitute. And it needed medical care desperately because many veterans needed long term care. A privately funded insurance based system would not work. So they socialized medicine, or adopted a single payer system that taxed the people low (they could not pay high taxes because their industries were in ruins) and sent the bill to…….Uncle Sam. Many European nations already had socialized systems adopted before the war, Russian and Germany for example.
That’s right, the birthplace of the European system of single payer or socialized medicine for those nations who already did not have it, was the checkbook of the American Tax Payer.
The Marshall Plan was devised for two good reasons: 1. Help the capitalist countries of Europe to recover economically from the ravages of WWII. 2. Help the PEOPLE of those countries with food and medicine to heal. That meant a huge amount of what was called foreign aid to help Europe (and Asia) to rebuild.
The reason? America had neglected to do this after WWI and the squalor and suffering of Europe had birthed Nazi Fascism, that turned right around and blew up the world in 1939…only twenty years after the Great War to End All Wars.
Post WWII America thrived, but its government was pushed hard, because there was no way it could pay for the Marshall Plan, so……it charged it on top of charging the war.
That’s right folks, America did not pay for the war with war bonds, or metal drives, America charged WWII. It also charged the Marshall Plan.
This meant while Europe rebuilt,and the United States enjoyed post war prosperity (the baby boom) by charging it….
Yep, Democrats AND Republicans knew that the American Taxpayer could not recover from the Depression (remember WWII ended the Depression), pay for the war, and rebuild Europe at the same time.
And like all politicians, they did not tell us. They kept it a secret. Republicans may have whined about the deficit, but they were in on the con, because really taxing to pay for the War and rebuilding would have put America in the worst Depression of all time.
Republicans, who still were smarting from being falsely blamed for the Great Depression, were desperately looking for a way to get political power back again. They finally found a way, tax cuts!
And for sure the United States could not adopt Europes socialized medicine or single payer solutions; the higher taxes this would have necessitated would have broken the economy and now would have played right into Republican hands (see above)..America was literally paying for WWII and Worldwide recovery with the earning power of children born in 1946 on (that would be us). So while we grew up with Bambi and Disney, Uncle Sam was waiting with an open hand…saying pay it back!
So, the United States, now that health care advances could cure many more diseases than every before adopted…..a manufacturing model based on private insurance through employers! Of all things that is what they did, thinking this miraculous system could cure health care as well.
It couldn’t; and didn’t……
This had been tried during the war, and it worked, because the largest employer was the United States. Almost all industry during the war was producing for its by far largest customer, the taxpayers of the United States. And that customer paid its bills with borrowed money from the future taxpayers.
And they never told us.
Actually we sort of knew. I asked my Dad once, when he was griping out income taxes going up and up in the 50s and 60s if they knew the war was charged, he looked at me and smiled…
Of course he knew. Any idiot would know.
So a private insurance scheme was hatched, Blue Cross Blue Shield, that somehow would cover health care costs (that were accelerating the longer the life span that was making health care more and more expensive).
The most expensive years of an individual American’s life are the last two years by national statistics….And that is WITH Hospice Care!
And the employer was the main provider of that private insurance scheme, who bought the insurance policies on employees and called it a BENEFIT! And they deducted this benefit cost form the salaries of their employees, sometimes at shall we say enhance rates….
This had the effect of driving down wages, that the first entry of this article alludes to.
And this worked nicely until about 1965, when I graduated from high school. Then the interest on the national debt, and that pesky little Vietnam, War, began to pull down the Great Society. In the 1970s and 1980s the bill really came due, and Reagan foolishly roared into power by promising somehow to cut taxes and raise boats and all sort of other insane things.
Meanwhile the employer health insurance system began to creak and groan as inflation drove health care cost up and up, and employers started cutting wages and cutting pensions to pay health care benefits.
Meanwhile the deficit went even higher, the real deficit not the one the government cleverly disguises, driving an inflation of various parts of the economy; housing costs now and health care costs to unsustainable highs.
That’s right UNSUSTAINABLE…that means folks the shit hits the fan.
And that is where we are today. We are kind of where Europe was seventy years ago, broke, inflation ridden and unable to provide health care to its citizens (affordable health care).
Obama, being a new President who actually tried to do the right thing (what a risk) tried to address this huge problem, but barely had enough votes to adopt a crippled private health insurance government supplement plan, that was attacked by Republicans and put them in power.
The Republican Party is the Interest Group party, and insurance companies in partnership with the industries that its premiums paid for health services and drugs, had the American public in a vise, that drained our incomes, overpaying for services that many of us seldom used.
That is the flaw in health care insurance insurance, profit. Insurance companies are profit making creatures, along a production model, that works for car insurance for example, but fails miserably for health care.
People, again are not cars. When people get sick you don’t just replace the part like a car. Sickness is not always predictable.
And when you tie it to insurance, you are asking for economic disaster.
And so, we have the most expensive and least efficient medical payment system on the planet earth. And, because profit is so easy to make, one of the worst medical systems in the world. We constantly read and suffer from incompetent care, over prescribed drugs that now have a generation (ours) hopelessly addicted on opioid drugs. Elders are like junkies in the inner city, found dead from overdoses, stealing to feed their habit, that was created by a prescription drug industry that dumps its “medicine” on unsuspecting “patients”; ie., addicts!
Europeans, who went to single payor and socialized medicine (like Great Britain) one of the world’s oldest Democracies by the way, are doing just fine, with what amounts to government support medicine that pays its doctors well, and its hospitals, but has cut out the insurance middleman.
And we argue and we fight and we elect idiots to office who lie to us, because look what happened to Obama and the Democrats, they actually tried to do something and were ripped apart.
We have an eternal Republican Congress who have morphed into destroy government cabal that is in league with the Russians for Christ’s Sake!
Destroy government? The only thing that will solve the medical insurance mess IS GOVERNMENT.
GOVERNMENT SUPPORTED (YES TAXPAYER SUPPORTED) HEALTH CARE SYSTEMS WITH A LIFETIME TAX AND A SINGLE PAYER (THE GOVERNMENT) will probably cause another Civil War!
And it will usher in a period of political history that will destroy the United States of America!