Liberal means what it has always meant. The problem is that the Democratic
Party leadership is Neo Liberal, not liberal in the true sense of the word. The
other problem is that Corporate America has completely succeeded in
brainwashing the public so that what matters to people is material comfort and
feeling superior to other kinds of people. Success means having a new car
every two years and getting a new smart phone when the new model appears on the
market and staying entertained. I don't think that the Marxist take the reality
of this when they think about organizing the masses. The masses have been
turned into vorascious consumers.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, February 21, 2021 8:19 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: BIDEN'S HEALTH PLAN SHIFTS EVEN MORE PUBLIC
DOLLARS INTO PRIVATE HANDS
"...Once again, the private industries are being bailed out and the people are
being sold out..."
Liberal is nothing more than a word used by the ACE to drive fear into the
hearts of witless consumers. Without a political force, the Working Class can
only choose between Conservative or Conservative Light. American Consumers
have traded their right to organize for a bundle of trinkets, promises, hollow
promises.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/21/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
BIDEN'S HEALTH PLAN SHIFTS EVEN MORE PUBLIC DOLLARS INTO PRIVATE HANDS
By Margaret Flowers, Truthout.
February 20, 2021 | EDUCATE!
Above photo: Billionaires for Wealthcare. YouTube.
As the American Rescue Plan (ARP) winds its way through Congress, some
progressives are hailing its health provisions as the greatest
expansion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 10 years, while
conservatives are claiming that it is a slippery slope to a national Medicare
for All system.
Democrats
have decided to forego seeking Republican support for President
Biden's
$1.9
trillion promise of relief to those suffering from the COVID-19
pandemic and recession by using the budget reconciliation process.
This has Republicans worried the legislation will be used to advance
the progressive agenda to expand government health care programs.
However, at the end of the day, while the bill may be used to
strengthen some provisions in the ACA, it will not move the United
States's health care system any closer to the popular national
improved Medicare for All system that we need. It is more likely to
enrich private health insurers and delay broader health care reform.
To understand why, it is important to note that the ACA, passed in
2010, was crafted to prevent national improved Medicare for All, not
to create a path toward it. Following the financial crash of 2008,
nearly 50 million people in the United States did not have health
insurance, primarily because the premiums were unaffordable. Something
had to be done, and public support for a single-payer health care
system, which would replace private health insurance with a universal
Medicare-like system, was growing.
The medical-industrial complex - consisting of the private health
insurance, pharmaceutical, hospital, and other related corporations -
viewed single-payer as a threat to the industry's bottom line and
worked overtime to stop it. Health industry corporations and trade
groups donated heavily to campaigns for federal office in 2008 and
invested billions in lobbyists to shape the ACA in their favor. The
Center for Public Integrity reports that a total of $3.47 billion was
spent to double the number of health care lobbyists in Washington,
D.C., in 2009. There were eight lobbyists per member of Congress.
Millions were also spent on public relations campaigns to portray
Medicare for All negatively and to convince people that what they
really wanted was a choice of health insurance.
Progressive organizations also played a role in preventing national
Medicare for All. Tens of millions of dollars were donated to
establish a front group called Healthcare for America Now (HCAN),
which was intentionally given a name similar to the national
grassroots Medicare for All group, Healthcare Now. HCAN convinced
advocates for universal health care that a single-payer system was not
achievable, and that a more practical demand would be a public health
insurance plan called a "public option." It worked, and progressives
became the loudest defenders of a bill that former Cigna executive
Wendell Potter renamed the "Private Insurance Profit Protection and
Enhancement Act" - even though it didn't include a public option.
The ACA Made For-Profit Health Care More Powerful While more people in
the United States gained health insurance because of the ACA, the
biggest winners were private health insurance, pharmaceutical
companies and large hospital corporations. Private health insurers
insisted throughout the reform process that people be mandated to
purchase their plans, which is what the ACA did. The only way for the
government to achieve that was to provide subsidies to cover health
insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs. For this, private insurers
receive hundreds of billions of public dollars each year.
Despite this high spending, the private health insurance expansion
only covered about one-third of the newly insured, around 7 million
people. The vast majority of those who gained coverage did so through
the Medicaid expansion, but even this enriched private insurance
corporations. Since the passage of the ACA, the proportion of people
in public health insurances, both Medicaid and Medicare, that are run
by private health insurers has soared so that the major health
insurers now receive most of their revenue from the government.
Pharmaceutical corporations also benefited. The increased number of
people with health insurance expanded their market. At the same time,
no controls were implemented to limit the prices of drugs. The rise in
pharmaceutical profits as a result of the ACA far outstripped those of
the health insurance and hospital industries.
And the ACA unleashed a wave of mergers and acquisitions throughout
the medical-industrial complex. Hospitals consolidated into large
chains and bought up physician practices and health facilities. These
mergers were an intended outcome of the ACA under the belief that
consolidation would lead to greater efficiency and lower prices.
Instead, the mergers drove up health care costs as these institutions
now wield greater bargaining power. The ACA ultimately made the
for-profit parts of the U.S. health care system more powerful, and
these are the industries we must take on to solve the health care
crisis.
Time To Stop Throwing Money At A Failed System Prior to the pandemic,
the number of people in the United States without health insurance was
about 30 million. That number has been rising steadily since 2017,
especially for people aged 18 to 64. Millions more people lost their
health insurance in 2020 due to the recession and pandemic, either
because they lost their jobs or because they could no longer afford
the health insurance premiums. The current number of people who are
uninsured is unknown, but a recent poll found that nearly 30 percent
of people in the United States lost their health insurance in 2020 and
less than half of them regained it.
Health care is a top issue again, as it was in 2008, and support for
national improved Medicare for All has grown as more people are
witnessing the profound flaws of a health care system that prioritizes
profits over health. So, what can we expect from the ARP?
When it comes to health care, we can expect more of the same. The
Biden proposal, if Congress adopts it, would increase tax credits for
purchasing private health insurance, expand the subsidies for
out-of-pocket costs to people with higher incomes, subsidize the cost
of COBRA (a program that allows people to maintain their employer
insurance when they lose their job), provide more money to the health
insurance exchanges, and provide incentives for states to expand
Medicaid. This is throwing more money at a failed system that changes nothing
fundamentally.
The Biden plan matches the requests of the medical-industrial complex.
In this press release, a coalition of private health insurers and
their lobby group, hospital corporations, physician organizations and
the Chamber of Commerce laid out their priorities. Each of their
priorities would funnel more public dollars to them either directly or
indirectly while the impact on people's ability to receive health care
will fall far short of what is needed.
Once again, the private industries are being bailed out and the people
are being sold out. Even though Biden campaigned on a public option,
it is not in the plan. The Commonwealth Fund finds that the ARP leaves
out people who live in states where they don't qualify for Medicaid
and don't earn enough to purchase health insurance through the
exchanges. A cynic might believe the Biden administration is less
concerned about that population since the states that rejected the Medicaid
expansion are majority-Republican states.
Most people who purchase private health insurance plans on the health
insurance exchange will continue to face significant barriers to
receiving health care. The plans have restricted networks that limit
where people can go for care and have out-of-pocket costs of thousands
of dollars before coverage begins. Subsidizing the cost of premiums
doesn't change the fact that many people don't have the cash on hand
to cover the copay or deductible required before they can get care.
None of these changes move the health care system closer to a national
improved Medicare for All, and in fact, the ARP may make it more
challenging to achieve it. The most obvious reason is that the ARP
shifts even more public dollars into private hands. Another concern is
that the ARP may result in cuts to Medicare. Politico reports that the
"pay-as-you-go" rules required under the budget reconciliation process
will result in reductions in spending in other programs. Restoring
that funding requires passing legislation dependent on Republican
support, which is not guaranteed to happen.
Medicare has been under attack over the past few decades, which is why
advocates for single-payer health care promote improving it to expand
benefits, get rid of out-of-pocket costs and do away with the need for
supplemental insurance. Further deterioration of Medicare will make it
less popular and provide ammunition for opponents to scare people away
from Medicare for All.
Finally, the measures taken to shore up the ACA will be used as
justification for not implementing broader changes to the health care
system. The ARP will be hailed as the "greatest expansion of health
care since the passage of the ACA." The public will be told that the
priority will be to make the ACA work, not replace the whole system
with Medicare for All. This is what happened in 2010. And, as Robert
Blendon states in Politico, emphasis will be put on what the ARP does
to address the crisis of the pandemic through expansions of testing
and vaccination, which will push the persisting overall health care
crisis out of the discussion.
We cannot solve the health care crisis by tweaking the current
complicated for-profit health care system. Throwing more money at it
will cover more people, but it won't cover everyone, and it won't
guarantee that people will get the health care they need even with
insurance. Health care is a public good, not a commodity. It can't be
treated as both at the same time. They contradict each other.
While single-payer advocates are often told that we need to achieve
Medicare for All through incremental steps, the reality is the
smallest measure that can be taken to create a health care system that
treats health as a public good is a national improved Medicare for All
- a system that is universal, comprehensive in benefits, publicly
financed and administered, and that removes profits. This will
generate the savings in health care spending needed to cover everyone
and build out the health care infrastructure so that everyone
everywhere in the country has what they need to live a healthy life.
President Biden has already declared his opposition to Medicare for
All. As it has been for every great achievement for social change in
the United States, we must build a movement that moves Medicare for
All from being impossible to being inevitable.
