The staggering lack of democracy in the United States on economic issues, and in particular on health care, has created a situation in which almost no US Senators favor Medicare for All despite likely majority support from the public.
The worst shills in the US Senate on this issue are not Republicans. In very red states like say Kansas, the population almost certainly does not favor Medicare for All. Orrin Hatch may oppose single payer, but at least he can rightly claim that his position is the one held by his constituents. So the prize for the most elitist senators here must go to the blue states.
Who is the worst sellout of the Senate? It may well be John Kerry, the lone remaining senator from the bluest state in the Union, Massachusetts. Why Kerry as opposed to competition like Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand from New York, you ask? After all, there are plenty of nauseating sellouts from very liberal states--how about Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island, the bluest state in the Union second only to Massachusetts?
But John Kerry should know that just mandating private insurance in an employer based health care system does not reduce costs much. After all, his state enacted a mandate for health insurance three years ago and results are not exactly promising: premiums in the Bay State are now the highest in the country, with total cost growth outpacing the national average by 7% over six years. While "experts" from the insurance industry point to a lack of cost controls by the state as the reason for cost growth, serious health care economists know that employer based health insurance is inevitably wasteful.
Instead of proposing Medicare for All, which would replace the broken system, Kerry has stuck to incremental reforms. In a nod to the Dutch health care system he once pushed the idea of a "stop-loss pool," which means compensating insurance companies for high cost, catastrophic cases. This is actually a good idea, but it ignores that countries where this system works don't have employer based health insurance, and that moving to a single payer system would hence be far more effective. The contrast to Senator Sanders in neighboring Vermont is like night and day.
Given Kerry's elite personal background it is hardly surprising that he is out of touch with the middle and working class. His extended family was heir to fabulous inherited wealth, with a great aunt paying for him to attend private schools in Europe and New England as a child. He spent his summers at the luxurious Forbes family estate and went on to attend Yale. Following a divorce from his first wife, as a senator he famously married Teresa Simões-Ferreira Heinz, heir to the vast fortune of her late husband John Heinz, and now possesses five homes including "a six-floor, $7 million townhome in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood, a $9 million ocean-front home on Nantucket, [and] a $5 million ski retreat in Idaho." His time in Vietnam aside, this is the life!
If you live in Massachusetts, be sure to phone and write a letter to John Kerry about S. 703. While his status as a member of the moneyed elite may make it easy to forget the concerns of ordinary people, we may yet be able to drum some sense into him. But in the more likely event that he continues to reject national health insurance, we will need a rerun of the 2008 primary challenge by Ed O'Reilly. O'Reilly did support Medicare for All and was a far better candidate for Massachusetts, including on issues like gay marriage which he supported unequivocally.
Ed O'Reilly supports Representative John Conyers' bill, the National Health Insurance Act (H.R. 676), and would file accompanying legislation in the Senate.
O'Reilly lost apparently because he was outspent by a huge margin. In any 2014 rerun, we need to change the script so that the better candidate wins.
Write to your congresspeople about HR 676, S. 703 and the Weiner and Kucinich amendments!
Update! Since my comments keep getting hide rated by GlowNZ and other people who are fanatically devoted to their party's leaders despite all available evidence, I am posting this graph here to better illustrate the problem I am discussing. Anyone who wants to actually discuss the evidence is welcome.
Responses
I'll be posting my responses here to serious comments, instead of down below where they'll be removed.
jim bow. I agree with you that there are many ways of creating an efficient health insurance system. However, all approaches that use private insurance mean the end of the employer based health insurance system. I wouldn't be against Kerry if he favored such a plan. But he doesn't.
Finally, in my diary I noted that premiums in Massachusetts rose 7% more than the national average over six years. It's true that Massachusetts having the highest premiums could be somewhat misleading, which is why I qualified it with a statistic that isn't.
Common criticism #1. You're saying that because Kerry is wealthy, he's a sellout.
No. I'm saying that because the people of Massachusetts favor national health insurance (probably by a quite large margin, extrapolating from national polling data and the great degree to which MA leans left as a state) and he does not, he's a sellout. He is ignoring the views of his constituents. That is my argument.
Criticism #2. You're insisting on purity.
I'm insisting that elected leaders take positions remotely similar to their constituents. Kerry's position is not even in the left wing half of the US population and he's the Senator from Massachusetts. This is about as fundamental as you can get.