Part 3
The levels of greed displayed by the wealthy and their tools, the GOP, continue to eviscerate the middle class, destroy our social contract and create a dysfunctional society, where caring about each other is looked down upon. The wealthy in other countries are not as greedy, nor do they attempt to destroy democracy, their fellow citizens and "own" the government to the same extent as america's wealthy which are a cancer and parasites on our society.

Why Is the For-Profit Health Industry Like a Giant, Bloodsucking Tick? https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-is-the-for-profit-health-industry?

#CorporateGreed
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#GOPLovesTheRich \
#GOPHatesWorkers
#TheRichHateAmericans

"In 1978, when Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized corporations owning politicians with their Buckley v Bellotti decision (written by Justice Louis Powell of “Powell Memo” fame), they made the entire process of replacing a profitable industry with government-funded programs like single-payer vastly more difficult, regardless of how much good they may do for the citizens of the nation.

The Court then doubled-down on that decision in 2010, when the all-Republican decision on Citizens United cemented the power of billionaires and giant corporations to own politicians and even write and influence legislation and the legislative process.

Medicare For All, like Canada has, would save American families thousands every year immediately and do away with the 500,000+ annual bankruptcies in this country that happen only because somebody in the family got sick.

But it would kill the billions every week in profits of the half-dozen corporate giants that dominate the health insurance industry.

The Covid crisis — which produced an explosion in healthcare debt for American families (but not for those in any other developed nation) — is starting to create considerable pressure for change, but Americans still must overcome the political corruption the Supreme Court wrote into our system with Citizens United.

It’ll be a big lift: keep it on your radar. And if you’d like to let your members of the House and Senate know that you stand with Bernie and in opposition to the GOP, the number for the congressional switchboard, which can connect you to any member, is 202-224-3121."

Part 2
The levels of greed displayed by the wealthy and their tools, the GOP, continue to eviscerate the middle class, destroy our social contract and create a dysfunctional society, where caring about each other is looked down upon. The wealthy in other countries are not as greedy, nor do they attempt to destroy democracy, their fellow citizens and "own" the government to the same extent as america's wealthy which are a cancer and parasites on our society.

Why Is the For-Profit Health Industry Like a Giant, Bloodsucking Tick? https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-is-the-for-profit-health-industry?

#CorporateGreed
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#GOPLovesTheRich \
#GOPHatesWorkers
#TheRichHateAmericans

"The leader of that healthcare-opposition movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a German immigrant named Frederick Hoffman. Hoffman was a senior executive for the Prudential Insurance Company, and wrote several books about the racial inferiority of Black people, a topic he traveled the country lecturing about.

His most well-known book was titled Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. It became a major best-seller across America when it was first published for the American Economic Association by the Macmillan Company in 1896, the same year the Supreme Court’s Plessy v Ferguson decision legally turned the entire US into an apartheid state.

Hoffman taught that Black people, in the absence of slavery, were so physically and intellectually inferior to whites that if they were simply deprived of healthcare the entire race would die out in a few generations. Denying healthcare to Black people, he said, would “solve the race problem in America.”

Southern politicians quoted Hoffman at length, he was invited to speak before Congress, and was hailed as a pioneer in the field of “scientific racism.” Race Traits was one of the most influential books of its era.

By the 1920s, the insurance company he was a vice president of was moving from life insurance into the health insurance field, which brought an added incentive to lobby hard against any sort of a national healthcare plan.

Which brings us to the second reason America has no national healthcare system: profits.

“Dollar” Bill McGuire, a recent CEO of America’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth, made about $1.5 billion dollars during his time with that company. To avoid prosecution in 2007 he had to cough up $468 million, but still walked away a billionaire. Stephen J Hemsley, his successor, made off with around half a billion.

And that’s just one of multiple giant insurance companies feeding at the trough of your healthcare needs.

Much of that money, and the pay for the multiple senior executives at that and other insurance companies who make over $1 million a year, came from saying “No!” to people who file claims for payment of their healthcare costs.

This became so painful for Cigna Vice President Wendell Potter that he resigned in disgust after a teenager he knew was denied payment for a transplant and died. He then wrote a brilliant book about his experience in the industry: Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans.

Companies offering such “primary” health insurance simply don’t exist (or are tiny) in every other developed country in the world but one. Mostly, where they do exist, they serve wealthier people looking for “extras” beyond the national system, like luxury hospital suites or air ambulances when overseas. (Switzerland is the outlier with exclusively private insurance, but it’s subsidized, mandatory, cheap, and non-profit.)

If Americans don’t know this, they intuit it.

In the 2020 election there were quite a few issues on statewide ballots around the country. Only three of them outpolled Joe Biden’s win, and expanding Medicaid to cover everybody was at the top of that list. (The other two were raising the minimum wage and legalizing pot.)

The last successful effort to provide government funded, single-payer healthcare insurance was when Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare and Medicaid (both single-payer systems) in the 1960s. It was a heck of an effort, but the health insurance industry was then a tiny fraction of its current size."

Part 1
The levels of greed displayed by the wealthy and their tools, the GOP, continue to eviscerate the middle class, destroy our social contract and create a dysfunctional society, where caring about each other is looked down upon. The wealthy in other countries are not as greedy, nor do they attempt to destroy democracy, their fellow citizens and "own" the government to the same extent as america's wealthy which are a cancer and parasites on our society.

Why Is the For-Profit Health Industry Like a Giant, Bloodsucking Tick? https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-is-the-for-profit-health-industry?

#CorporateGreed
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#GOPLovesTheRich \
#GOPHatesWorkers
#TheRichHateAmericans

"Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives, and already have their sights set on forcing major cuts to “entitlements” like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

One of the promises McCarthy made to become speaker was to force a vote on dialing back 2023/2024 spending back to 2021 levels — and there’s been a 7% inflation increase in costs/expenses since then. In other words, they want massive cuts.

His Republican colleagues have already outlined the starting point for their demands, as reported by Yahoo News:

“The Republican Study Committee proposed a budget for fiscal 2023 that would gradually increase the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare, and change the Social Security benefit formula for people 54 and younger…”

In that, they’re going to have a hell of a fight on their hands, as Senator Bernie Sanders is taking over leadership of the Senate Health Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid. He’s already promising “a lot of subpoenas” will be arriving at the offices of healthcare and big pharma CEOs.

Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens.

That’s it. We’re the only one left. Were the only country in the developed world where somebody getting sick can leave a family bankrupt, destitute, and homeless.

A half-million American families are wiped out every year so completely that they must lose everything and declare bankruptcy just because somebody got sick. The number of health-expense-related bankruptcies in all the other developed countries in the world combined is zero.

Yet the United States spends more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP.

Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.

Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll (and don’t even cover all working people), whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10% and would cover every man, woman, and child in America.

How and why are Americans being played for such suckers?

We are literally the only developed country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf. The for-profit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.

And it’s not like we haven’t tried to remove that parasite.

Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all proposed and tried to bring a national healthcare system to the United States.

Here’s one example really worth watching where President Kennedy is pushing a single-payer system (as opposed to Britain’s “socialist” model; it’s 2 minutes and gets better as it goes along):

They all failed, and when I did a deep dive into the topic last year for my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare I found two major barriers to our removing that tick from our backs.

The early opposition, more than 100 years ago, to a national healthcare system came from southern white congressmen (they were all men) and senators who didn’t want even the possibility that Black people could benefit, health-wise, from white people’s tax dollars. (This thinking apparently still motivates many white Southern politicians.)..."

"The GOP is refusing to fund government programs that help people avoid getting Covid. And the uninsured will suffer the most."

Republicans Are Consigning the Poor to Disease and Death | The Nation https://www.thenation.com/article/society/covid-funding-inequality/

#GOPHatesThePoor
#GOPLovesCovid
#Covid
#GOPLovesTheRich

"The GOP is refusing to fund government programs that help people avoid getting Covid. And the uninsured will suffer the most.

Covid-19 cases, predictably, have climbed as the weather turned cold in much of the country. As of mid-December, cases had jumped more than 50 percent, while deaths were up 40 percent.

But this winter surge is occurring amid a new reality: The Republicans in Congress refused to pass more Covid funding in April, and they have held firm on that stance ever since. Now the government money to help people avoid getting Covid is running out. And it’s the poor, who are already more exposed to Covid, who will suffer the most.

Until this year, Congress allocated enough money for the federal government to buy Covid tests, vaccines, and treatments and provide them to Americans at no cost, even if they had no insurance. The federal government also used to reimburse doctors and other health care providers for testing, treating, and vaccinating uninsured people. But in April, after the Republicans in Congress stripped additional Covid money from a government funding package, the Department of Health and Human Services stopped these efforts. Now the pop-up tents that used to advertise and administer free Covid tests have blocked out the word “free” with duct tape or closed completely. And the program the government started in January to provide all Americans with eight free home Covid tests per household ended in September, although the Biden administration announced in mid-­December that it would use unspent funds to send out another round of free tests.

The uninsured, who are more likely to be low-income and people of color, will shoulder the burden of the government’s inaction. Some patients have faced bills of as much as $3,000 for a Covid test, and even at-home tests go for $25 for two—costs the uninsured will have to cover on their own. Vaccines and Paxlovid, Pfizer’s antiviral pills that reduce the risk of hospitalization and death, are free for now, but people can still be charged for the doctor’s visit to administer or prescribe them. Hospitalization for serious cases of Covid can cost a person more than $1 million.

These burdens are falling on a population that already faced lower access to vaccines even when far more funding and support was available. As of early November, 22 percent of households earning less than $50,000 a year were unvaccinated, and a quarter hadn’t gotten a booster shot. Compare that to 6.5 percent of households earning $150,000 or more who are unvaccinated and 15 percent who aren’t boosted. Of the lower-­income families who haven’t gotten a booster yet, about a third said it was because they hadn’t made an appointment or had the time, or because they didn’t have the transportation or couldn’t get an appointment.

The federal programs that provided free child care and transportation for vaccination appointments are long gone. So too is the mandatory paid time off for vaccination, even though low-income Americans are far less likely to get paid time off at work. And now these other supports are slipping away.

When the government’s supply of vaccinations and tests runs out, people without insurance will have to pay for them out of pocket. After the vaccines are commercialized in the coming year, each Pfizer shot will cost $110 to $130. The government is going to stop covering the cost of Paxlovid in mid-2023 and allow the drug to be put on the market, and AstraZeneca’s Evu­sheld and ­Merck’s Lagevrio are set to be commercialized even sooner. The government got a discount when it bought Paxlovid in bulk, paying $530 for each individual round, and it will “cost far more on the private market,” according to Hannah Recht, a data reporter at Kaiser Health News.

Even those with insurance could feel the sting of these changes, facing high copays as they do for other expensive drugs. Their premiums may also rise as insurance companies absorb the cost of vaccines and treatments. Not to mention that allowing the virus to circulate among any portion of the population will spread it to everyone else.

President Biden has asked Congress for $2.5 billion to cover Covid vaccines and treatments—down from his original request of $30 billion—but Congress has yet to respond. If the Republicans don’t get on board and vote for more funding, they’ll be consigning the poor to even more preventable disease and death"