The Congressional Trumpcare clown car pileup gives the nation a moment to reflect on the complexities that surprised Donald Trump.
We all know who the health care players are – doctors and nurses, hospitals and clinics, drug companies and pharmacies, medical equipment manufacturers, health insurance companies, ambulance services and paramedics, physical therapists, and hospices.
Each contributes to your health care, except one. That exception has grown like a cancer, and the United States must remove it before it destroys us.
Furthermore, no health insurance policy will help. That is because the health insurance industry is the cancer.
Every member of Congress, regardless of party, knows this. Yet no Republican can acknowledge it because each one is a wholly owned subsidiary of the health insurance cabal.
Among the numerous approaches necessary to getting the rapidly rising costs of American health care under control, the single most effective change would be the creation of a single payer health insurance system and the eradication of the parasitic private health insurance industry.
Nobody can deny that the free market continues to provide the most goods and services to more people at the lowest possible cost, and in the shortest time. Despite this, the free market is not capable of meeting all of society’s complex needs.
Consider other government services that we now take for granted. On 9/11 American firefighters became international heroes. But before we had municipal fire departments, firefighting was chaotic.
Until the mid-1800’s, we endured a jumble of private fire insurance companies and inconsistent volunteer fire companies. Firefighting was unreliable, inconsistent, and often conducted by drunks who engaged in looting as much as fighting fires. (The Martin Scorsese film “Gangs of New York” included scenes depicting what firefighters used to be.)
By contrast, today’s municipal fire departments are dependable, effective and professional. They’re single-payer. And it works. It’s the same with police. Imagine if the private security industry had a lobby with pockets as deep as health insurance, we’d be hammered with warnings of government takeovers and socialized police departments.
We have single-payer highways, fire and police departments, libraries, postal services, and education. But with health insurance, other industrialized nations leave America in the dust of the past.
For cost and quality of care, they offer abundant proof that single payer systems cost less per capita and a much smaller percentage of the GDP, even though they cover every citizen. This is despite objections from those opponents of the Affordable Care Act who depend on the single-payer Medicare system and drive to Trump rallies over single-payer roads and highways.
Benjamin Franklin was being conservative [sic] when he noted “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Prevention is worth much more, and it costs each American less.
As such, how can any American prefer a system that includes, among other absurdities, uninsured flu sufferers clogging up emergency rooms as they generate 1,000-dollar hospital bills, rather than making sure every American gets a 2-dollar flu shot? It’s the same with all preventative care.
The countries that relegated private health insurance to the dust bin of history provide overall care equal to or better than that in the United States, cover all of their citizens, manage chronic illnesses with greater effectiveness and at a lower cost, promote healthy lifestyles that keep costs down, and have populations that are on average healthier than Americans.
Despite having some of the finest nurses and doctors in the world, the United States ranks 36th in average lifespan among all nations.
There isn’t one free market health insurance system anywhere in the world that works. The United States is the world’s most conspicuous example.
If all this isn’t enough to shame every American into acknowledging that the sewage of free market health insurance cannot be pasteurized, nothing is.