Why We Need Medicare For All

The fight for Medicare For All isn’t a new one. Actually, it’s been raging at least since the early 1900’s. President Harry Truman lost this battle with The American Medical Association during the height of the Cold War. Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Jacob Javits, Representative Pete Stark, Representative John Conyers, and Former President John F. Kennedy also all fought and lost battles to pass this revolutionary legislation. Former President Barack Obama calls it “a good idea” and study after study shows that Americans would be better off with Medicare For All.

So, why hasn’t it passed?

The answer is extraordinarily complicated, but is a combination of corruption, incompetence, cowardice, complacency and systemic failures of America’s “democracy”.

What matters now is that hope for Medicare For All remains alive, and that is due to the efforts of Senator and 2x Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

Sanders brought Medicare For All back to the mainstream during his 2016 campaign, forcing Hillary Clinton to propose a public option for Medicare. Since his defeat, the insurance industry has gotten even more corrupt, healthcare and pharmaceutical drug costs have gone up, and even less Americans have adequate insurance than when he first ran.

Now he’s back and the frontrunner in the hotly contested democratic primary, and he’s not backing down.

The need for Medicare For All has never been greater. In my own town of Fort Collins, around 5% of the population has no health insurance. However, the costs for those even with insurance is untenable. The lack of options are also a problem for students without adequate transportation if the CSU Health center isn’t within their network. The problems faced by the Fort Collins community pale in comparison to national statistics however.

Around 10% of Americans have no health insurance, countless others are under-insured, healthcare costs are around $11,172 per person, and health spending currently makes up around 17% of our GDP. There are innumerable statistics I could use to justify the need for Medicare-For-All, but the human cost of our atrocious healthcare system far outweigh the statistics.

Levels of anxiety, depression and addiction are at a historical highs right now, and part of that problem is the lack of access for countless Americans to high-quality mental health treatment. Instead, we’ve substituted an unsustainable system of prescribing drugs that often make the problems worse, not better.

Medicare For All would make the cost of mental healthcare, healthcare, and pharmaceutical drugs virtually free, and pay for it the same way we do now, minus a predatory insurance industry and the high administrative costs of the current system. A recent study shows that Americans would save $600 Billion on healthcare costs by switching to a single payer system, and there’s plenty more to back it up.

The counter-argument mainly focuses on the “high” costs of Medicare For All, the difficulty of revolutionizing our current system, and the message to unions who have fought hard for their high quality healthcare. All of those concerns, while valid, can be easily refuted.

Medicare for All, as mentioned, is significantly cheaper than our current system by around $10–20 Trillion, and merely shifts the way we pay from out of pocket expenses to taxes. Bernie’s plan also has a transition plan in place that will gradually phase out the insurance industry over four years by lowering the age of Medicare recipients ten years for every year. Finally, unions actually stand to benefit from Medicare For All because they will be able to negotiate for better benefits, wages and quality of work with healthcare out of the way.

Americans want Medicare For All. According to a The Hill/Harris X poll, around seventy percent of Americans support the legislation. Further, Bernie’s rock-solid increasing base of support, the rise of prominent politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the popularity of a public option all signal that the American people are ready for Medicare For All.

However, the forces that have defeated the proposal are intact and more emboldened than ever. The insurance industry is openly funding Sanders opponents, media pundits have launched an all out assault on the policy, and Congress currently stands a next-to-zero chance of passing Bernie’s Medicare For All bill.

As public pressure mounts, it’s possible the tide becomes unassailable and Americans get the policy they deserve. Medicare For All will be a test for American democracy, and represents a larger struggle between the will of the American people and Kleptocracy.

We’ll know what America is by the end of this fight, for better or for worse.

Citations:

Abrams, A. (2019, May 30). Medicare for All’s Surprising Origins in Health Care. Retrieved from https://time.com/5586744/medicare-for-all-history/

Historical. (n.d.). Retrieved 2020, from https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical

Finnegan, J. (2020, January 15). New study says ‘Medicare for All’ will save the U.S. money with lower healthcare costs. Retrieved February 15, 2020, from https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/practices/new-study-says-medicare-for-all-will-save-u-s-money-lower-healthcare-costs