The Republican primaries came apart at the seams the other night with supposedly mature men who are running for the Presidency of the greatest nation in the world, squabbling like children in a schoolyard or punks on a street corner.
But there is still one cause that unites all the GOP office seekers and it is the ACA our national healthcare program. Perhaps because they are who they are, it unites them on the wrong side of the fight, as they unanimously try to get it repealed. Of course they all say, “repeal and replaced,” because any moron knows that no functioning nation can exist without a national healthcare system but replacing anything in this era of a “do nothing” congress is all but impossible.
The law slipped through in the first year of the Obama administration. The President was political enough to allow the Right to bring in the drug and insurance lawyers who had financed their campaigns, their country club memberships and often their yachts, to write a good portion of it. That portion is now killing the program along with thousands of sick people all over the country.
Obamacare’s Rightwing opponents scream that it is too expensive; that it is costing jobs; that it will increase the already soaring national debt. This is all true… sort of. But there is a solution. Unfortunately for the opponents of the ACA, said solution will cut off their financial pipeline from the drug, medical device and insurance industries, a source of funds that keeps them alive and kissing the asses of those that are destroying our national health, even as they suck billions out of the system.
In order to have a successful healthcare system we have to first; get rid of the insurance companies. Get them out of healthcare entirely! This means a single payer system just like we have in the Medicare and Medicaid systems where it works fine. Then we have to rescind all the agreements between Government and the prescription drug and medical device industries that prohibit government from regulating prices. These two steps have to be taken because although most of the problems caused by the failures of the ACA have been patient and doctor orientated, they all flow from one source. Money!
Those that scream for the end of the ACA will tell us that it costs too much, that we cannot sustain its costs. Sure it does, but the reason it costs so much is the 20-40% profits being taken out by the insurance companies. The reason it costs so much is the 1000% multiples being charged for drugs and medical devices.
The insurance companies are so arrogant and entrenched they don’t even put up an argument for their egregious pricing and more importantly, their denial of claims. On the other hand, the drug and medical device companies immediately raise the towering spectacle of research and development costs. Yes, research and development does take money, big money, but most of the significant money being spent in those areas right now, is being spent by the government and in the future, the government should spend all of that money.
That would be one of the two scenarios that would work to restrain the tendencies of the drug and medical device companies to drastically overprice their products. What I am suggesting here is that the government does all the research and development and simply licenses the patents to drug companies to sell at regulated prices. The other would be to make the drug and device companies put a price on their research and then figure that number into the allowable cost of their products. Either would allow the companies to make a viable profit but would keep them from gouging sick people for the benefit of their overpowering greed.
The three crazy GOP candidates had a big brouhaha at the debates over drawing rings around the states. It came from Trump who recognized the ludicrous current situation in which each state can only be open to one insurance company, thereby creating an insurance monopoly in every state. He wants to open every state to every insurance company, which would mitigate the costs somewhat, because all the insurance companies will cut back on prices a little as a nod to competition. They will still, however, be adding unnecessary costs to a system that shouldn’t have to sustain them.
Yes, a single payer or government takeover of the health insurance system will be rife with mismanagement, bureaucracy and incompetence, but it will still be eons better than the current system that depends on huge profits and achieves them by cheating the people who pay premiums, out of their rightful coverage.
I listened today, to an almost hysterical doctor who admitted to me that more than half of his Humana patients had been denied coverage for everything from prescription drugs, to treatments to hospital stays. The paperwork just to fight these claims, he said, was burying him. He and his staff worked 16-hour days just to keep up with the insurance battle.
I subsequently, spoke to three pharmacies in my neighborhood, with which I do business and at which I have had insurance claims denied and each told me that they spend more time with the paperwork of denied claims then they do with filling prescriptions. Two of them admitted that the reason they had to stop filling some prescriptions was that they were involved in contract battles with Humana who was trying to force them into a rate, which would not allow them to stay in business. The result of this contract negotiation and the denials by Humana, causes patients to waste days of their own time and almost as much of their doctor’s, getting new prescriptions, fighting denials and running from drug store to drug store straightening out who was responsible for what.
How does one solve these complicated seemingly intransient problems and still hold down a job? The answer is supposed to be; that’s why one has a government, but in this case half of that government wants simply to make the problem worse. Half of that government believes that they are doing the right thing by allowing greedy insurance companies to destroy the lives of their premium paying customers. Half the government says, “too bad you’re sick, the guys who are screwing you are buying us pools, paving our driuveways and paying our election bills, so, drop dead.” And people are!
I understand that this country is only 240 years old and as such, it is far behind many other nations in this world in sophistication and understanding. On the other hand, we have already far surpassed many of them in the humane treatment of our citizen’s. Yet despite our greatness, we will never catch up with the other nations if we do not recognize the fact that superior universal health care is a goal that we cannot ignore. There are certain areas in which a country must take care of business, and universal health care comes right after the four freedoms.
In order to create a fair, moral, functional, universal healthcare system we must eliminate the insurance companies and we must control the drug and medical device companies. This will not be easy. These are greedy organizations, awash with money that they will spend freely to protect their already egregious profits. But the fight must be fought! The first step is at the ballot box. If that is not sufficient, then it must continue into the streets. Lives are already being lost to the cause of greed. If it takes a few more, so be it.