This article put out Wednesday, August 8th, 2018 accuses Bernie Sanders of “spin” and cherry picking”. I know very little about Healthcare or how it works, or doesn’t work, but this recent version of the corporate propaganda campaign against anything that holds Big Pharma, the insurance cartels, and fat-cat CEO’s accountable or threatening profiteering in Healthcare, seems pretty easy to identify
Here is the title of the story AP put out:
It’s the latest response to this Medicare for All advocacy from not only Bernie Sanders but from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who also included Medicare for all as a major plank in her winning campaign.
"Almost every other developed nation in the world has universal healthcare,"
Ocasio-Cortez's website says.
"It's time the United States catch up to the rest of the world in ensuring all people have real healthcare coverage that doesn't break the bank."
This is what has the GOP and other special corpo interests worried:
A Koch backed fellow libertarian named Charles Blahous wrote up a report (pdf) for the Koch bros. supported George Mason University Mercatus Center that demonstrated what Bernie Sanders and many other progressive Dems have been advocating for years. That Medicare for All saves money and lives
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Just a quick break here to point out a source on Mercatus Center and the Koch’s “involvement”
May 25, 2018
George Mason University President Ángel Cabrera acknowledged this month that his school gave the Charles Koch Foundation “some influence” over hiring and evaluating faculty as it accepted millions of dollars for its free-market research center, the Mercatus Center.
This news rankled the academic world, but it perhaps didn’t come as a surprise. Many scholars saw this as just the latest revelation of strings-attached giving with an ideological slant – another encroachment on the sacrosanct idea that teaching and research at universities, especially public ones like George Mason, must be immune from outside influence.
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Back to the spun up AP story accusing Bernie Sanders of what corporate interests are themselves up to.
The Blahous’s Mercatus Center report did in fact demonstrate that $ billions would be saved each year with Medicare for all. Just as progressive Dems with research to back it up have been saying for years
One of the leading Fact checker outfits, that graded Bernie Sanders statements about the cost savings outlined in the Mercatus report, graded Bernie Sanders as being “Half True"
That fact-checking judgement itself appears to be only “half true”
It appears that the fact-checker outfit did a bit of cherry picking of their own. Specifically one of the GOP’s favorites; the “skin in the game” accusation, with another typical republican politician’s scare tactic of “tax hikes” added to it:
Skeptics counter that those savings are not guaranteed, and the lack of a monetary incentive for patients to hold back on services could lead to increased use of the system, adding to the overall cost.
In addition, with the government having to raise revenue to pay everyone’s bills, taxes and the federal debt could go dangerously high, potentially canceling out or exceeding the money that individuals and families would save in higher take-home pay and lower health-care expenses.
— emphasis added
Two scary GOP talking points right there. Both untrue.
And here the ridiculous (and cruel, and not without the usual GOP racial implications) GOP soundbite is debunked
the lie:
"It doesn't take a whole lot of smarts or a whole lot of blind faith in markets to recognize that when you don't charge people for things (including health care), they will consume too much of it."
yeah “they” will consume too much healthcare
The truth:
Levitt's complacent confidence in this idea as it applies to health and medicine prompts us to inquire: Is he right?
The answer, according to numerous studies and plenty of empirical evidence, is "No."
Both untrue. Both cherry picked “issues", already addressed by single payer advocates for years (How Medicare for All is financed | pdf)
The libertarian write up by Charles Blahous @ the Koch bros. financed Mercatus Center puts the “skin in the game" lie into these words (pdf | table 4 | page 22):
— Added induced demand from increased coverage
and several times repeated throughout:
The estimate of the induced demand increase associated with replacing these insurance policies with single payer insurance of AV 100 percent was derived on the basis of the HHS Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters for 2014. See HHS Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters for 2014, 78 Fed. Reg. 15,410 (March 11, 2013). Thorpe, in
“Analysis of Senator Sanders Single Payer Plan,”
— emphasis added
Here are two writeups on the topic:
— By Matt Bruenig | July 13th, 2018
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And this is another:
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With one more scare tactic that the ‘fact checker’ outfit apparently threw in as a bonus:
Blahous said.
"Obviously, immediately cutting payments to health care providers by roughly 40 percent would lower national health spending."
But would cuts that large actually occur (and without other negative consequences, such as mass retirements of doctors unwilling to accept lower fees)? This is where independent experts express caution.
Squeezing doctors may be what Blahous is looking at to sell his narrative, but it is the opposite of what Medicare for All has planned:
A single-payer system would eliminate most of these costs, raising the share of spending going to providers up to the 98% rate for Medicare. With almost a trillion dollars in premiums paid into private health insurance, lowering the administrative ratio to the Medicare rate would save over $197 billion.11
Daily Kos’ mettle fatigue has this information posted today: ..Doctors are embracing Medicare for All
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— the GOP have nothing that most people want — In this video David Sirota @ TYT explains how the GOP propagandized Medicare for All last time around (September of 2017)