Our Medical Mess

I just read an article in Reader Supported News entitled, “Why Cable News Hates Medicare For All.” It’s brief and concise and it illustrates most of the arguments I have been making for Single Payer for a number of years, but it adds the single most important argument against an intelligent approach to medical health imaginable, one that I had not included. Media Advertising!

I had gone into great detail in a few blogs about the crimes of insurance companies and big pharma, along with how and why they would be dead set against Single Payer or Medicare For All. Insurance companies would lose a huge and highly profitable piece of their market. Pharmaceutical companies would lose the power to set prices at wherever level they wanted because now they would have the government, a huge and powerful factor, telling them what they could charge and more important, what it would pay. They would no longer be able to charge ten times what they now charge for the same drug in Canada.

One of the biggest opposition points against Single Payer at the time of the Democratic Debates was that many people didn’t want to give up their union or employer supplied insurance. Too many people in this world simply don’t understand that even though hundreds of union or corporate plans are very attractive, they have little stability and less guarantee of being there when you need them.

The COVID crisis has made this problem alarmingly clear. Corporations have gone out of business leaving their employees completely without health care. Unions, with a huge percentage of their membership unemployed have not collected the dues necessary to pay for their healthcare programs. This has proven especially egregious in the entertainment field where Equity, SAG and AFTRA plans have collapsed. All of a sudden the private health care plans don’t look very attractive at all.

The fact is, if one really looked into them they never actually were, but most people only looked as far as their last free treatment. What no one who wanted to keep private healthcare ever considered was the additional cost factor, probably because insurance companies have worked very hard to play it down. Insurance companies have traditionally worked on a profit markup of between 20% and 40%. That means every claim they handled cost someone or some institution that much more than the real cost of treatment. Right now the cost of medical treatment in this country is up to 10 times what it is in most civilized nations and its coverage is not always as good. That’s because most civilized nations have an equivalent of Single Payer. Take the cost of private insurance out of the equation and the cost of medical care will drop significantly. So will the costs of drugs because as the only payer Medicare will be in a position to force down the price of drugs to a fair number. Sure the drug companies will lobby like hell and line the pockets of everyone in congress but the simple fact of being the only game in town will give Medicare a hell of a hand to play.

Then there’s the factor of research and development, its cost and its control of the marketplace.

Yes, Big Pharma did a hell of a job getting reliable vaccines into the marketplace this time around, but you can bet they will be making gigantic profits on that work, profits that far outstrip any number they deserve. If you look at the facts, it’s amazing but still pretty reprehensible. I say that knowing full well that everyone is praising them for doing it so fast. Sure it was fast but it could have been faster. It was fast because they had already done a lot of the research on the SAARS virus and had stopped that before it became a pandemic and that’s the key. There’s always a ton of research when there’s a profit at the end of the tunnel, but there are all kinds of deadly diseases out there that have no cure simply because there aren’t enough people suffering from them to guarantee a profit from researching and making the drug. That’s called Crony Capitalism, but in this case it will be easy to stop the abuse. With Single Payer the government will be able to take over all research, own all patents and control the prices of all drugs for the benefit of all people – even those who work for the drug companies.

For those of you who find my conclusions hard to believe, I have a very simple solution. Check out California Democratic Representative Katie Porter. This is a woman who is defined by the term “Pit Bull!” I just watched a series of interrogations she conducted of drug company executives during various congressional hearings and she is not just smart, informed and ferocious; she is also motivated to demolish all Crony Capitalist bullshit and cut to the absolute truth of all matters. Find her on U-Tube and watch her reduce grown men to sniveling cockroaches. It’s not just her mad dog approach; it’s her staggering grasp of the facts of every confrontation that quickly turns these sweating, quivering millionaires into bumbling, blubbering fools. It was shear joy to watch her turn a drug company CEO who was clearing over $13 million a year into a stumbling, stuttering pile of quivering meat as she skewered him with the fact that by raising the price of a cancer drug from $235 a pill to over $750 a pill over a 13 year period he had added $2.5 million to his total remuneration that year alone. Best show I’ve seen this year. It’s all true and it’s all real.