Tag Archives: Obamacare

Political Rants

We’re not doing this for our health

News flash: our health care system is broken. That is to say, it is broken from the standpoint of the people who need medical treatment. From the industry investor standpoint, it’s working just fine. People are making a killing, quite literally, from COVID and other illnesses, lending credence to that line from our song Well, Well, Well: “from every misfortune a fortune is made.”

I say this on a week when women’s health is under attack to an even greater extent than usual. The Texas anti-abortion law, which the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed to go into effect, has effectively made abortion illegal in the lone star state, regardless of what their moronic governor claims. This inevitably will be followed with similar restrictions in other “red” states. But even under the best of circumstances, women have trouble accessing and affording care precisely because of the kind of system we still have.

Promises, promises

When he was running for president, Donald Trump promised that he would replace the ACA (“Obamacare”) with something much better, a plan that would cover everyone, etc. Of course, that was a transparent lie that he had no intention of even pretending to make good on. Then last year, when he was running for president, Joe Biden promised adding a public option to the ACA. No sign of that yet, either.

I don’t know what Biden’s plans are for the reconciliation package with respect to health care. What I do know is what he said during the campaign. Back then, he claimed that workers loved their employer-based healthcare and suggested that they had “negotiated” for it. I pointed out back then on my podcast Strange Sound that this was balderdash. Less than 15% of American workers (generously) have union contracts. No one other than a subset of unionists ever “negotiates” the particulars of their health coverage with their employer. The plain fact is that employers provide substandard coverage to their employees, by and large, and that it leaves tremendous gaps.

The six thousand dollar man

As some of you know, I spent about a week in the hospital at the height of the COVID first wave back in April 2020. (It was an ailment unrelated to COVID, as it happened.) After I got out, I got bills that amounted to about $6,000. Now let me be clear – if I did not have health insurance, provided by my employer, the cost would have been much higher. But with this great insurance that Joe Biden suggested I love so much, I was six grand out of pocket over an unexpected illness. I opted for a payment plan with the hospital (which, I should point out, receives a lot of public subsidy).

That is not the way it works in civilized countries. In civilized countries, they do their best to make you well, and that’s it. No bill, or none of any consequence. In Britain and France, I believe, they even give you money when you leave the hospital, under certain circumstances. Why are we not a civilized country? I don’t know. Ask Joe Biden. And every other president, for that matter.

I am fortunate that i had the resources to bear that cost with only minor sacrifices. Most people – including many with employer based coverage – are not that lucky. We need a system that works for those people, not the people who seek to profit from our misfortunes.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Lying in state.

John McCain was held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for more than five years. That’s a long stretch in a third world prison, particularly when it’s in a country that’s been under sustained withering attack from a superpower for longer than that. He was abused, and that was reprehensible – prisoners should not be maltreated or deliberately deprived of proper care, nutrition, etc. I am against mistreatment and torture regardless of who is being subjected to it, and McCain was far from the worst; just a cog in a genocidal war machine that he eventually came close to seeing as  inappropriately applied in that conflict. And late in life, he admitted that the Iraq war had been a “mistake” and expressed regret for his part in bringing it about.

Lest we forget ... the real McCain.Those are the two best things I can say about the late senior senator from Arizona. The fact is, he spent his entire political career pressing for war every time the opportunity arose; it was central to his brand. He simply never met a war he didn’t like, from Reagan’s proxy wars in Central America and elsewhere, to the Gulf War, to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, you name it. He was pressing for direct American involvement in the Syrian civil war early on. And in spite of his celebrated vote against the Obamacare repeal, he has supported Trump’s legislative agenda more than eighty percent of the time, most notably voting to pass the $1.5T tax giveaway to the richest people in the country – a bill that also hobbled the ACA by canceling the mandate.

Of course, the mainstream news media reference none of this in their wall-to-wall coverage of his passing, preferring to expound endlessly on what a peerless leader of men McCain was. MSNBC’s amnesia regarding this topic is breathtaking. I clearly remember his 2008 presidential campaign, and it was full of divisive rhetoric, particularly what emanated from his crackpot vice presidential pick, Sara Palin. McCain, too, made rally speeches about how Obama was not like you and me. He obsessed about Russia in Georgia (note: a chief foreign policy advisor was on Georgia’s payroll at the time) and advocated for a federal spending freeze when the financial crisis hit – a Hoover-esque move that would have brought on another great depression. And yet with all this (and much else), MSNBC only shows that one moment in that one rally when McCain shut down some crazy old racist with a clumsily bigoted rejoinder about how Obama was not an “Arab” but, rather, a good family man.

I could go on, but seriously … the point is that the corporate media loved McCain and were incapable of reporting on him honestly. That they would continue spinning the maverick myth even after he’s gone should surprise no one.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Sickness.

As I write this, the Senate Republicans have pulled their version of the ACA “repeal and replace” legislation – a bill that’s really more a massive tax cut funded by massive cuts in Medicaid. This temporary hiatus is mostly down to the many thousands of people across the country who made their voices heard in various ways, and so to all of you I say job well done. That said, this job is not, in fact, done. The Republicans will be back very soon with a slightly amended version of the bill that can garner 50 votes, after having bought off key senators with part of that $300 billion-plus deficit reduction bundle built into this piece of legislative ordure. Just watch.

Two old men who will never need Medicaid.This entire situation – I won’t say “debate” because there hasn’t been any – is ridiculous largely because no one in Washington will admit to what the ACA’s core problems are. The Republicans, and to a certain extent many Democrats, continue to insist that competition and a freer market in health insurance will deliver affordable coverage to everyone; just pull those sick people out of the system and into an underfunded high-risk pool, and the market can do its magic.

Bullshit. The “free market” approach to individual coverage doesn’t work because individual health insurance is not a profitable line of business; insurers have known this for decades and have been pulling out of individual policies because they carry too much downside risk. They prefer large employer plans, where the only money being risked is that of the client company, not the insurer. Even if you start an individual health policy in good health, things inevitably go wrong and then the company is on the hook. Sure, they prefer younger, healthier folks as customers, but even they get cancer once in a while. Individual policies are not a money maker unless the market is so drastically tilted in the insurer’s favor that they can basically sell nominal “coverage” to healthy people.

This is why Medicaid is such a popular program. Even the GOP’s complaints about it all center on cost, not care. (They just see it as a cash cow.) Medicaid is not provided on market principles; neither is Medicare nor the veterans health program. No health insurance should be market-driven, because treating it like a commodity severely disadvantages poorer, older, and sicker people. Those categories apply to most everyone at some point in their lives. The only way to ensure that coverage will be there for all of us when we need it is single payer.

Last word: this Senate bill is sick; it is a tax cut scheme built on gutting Medicaid and pulling money from Medicare. And it will be back.

luv u,

jp