The proportion of Americans who say that it is the government’s responsibility to ensure health care coverage for all has reached a nearly two-decade high, new polling finds. According to a Gallup survey released Monday, 62 percent of Americans now say that the federal government should ensure that all Americans have coverage, versus 36 percent who say it should not. Support is highest among…
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Advocates for a government-run healthcare program applauded U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna for pushing back during a Sunday morning interview in which ABC News anchor Martha Raddatz casually dismissed Medicare for All as a proposal that has no chance of ever being implemented. Khanna (D-Calif.) spoke to Raddatz days after the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City — an…
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The United States healthcare system is so broken, sometimes I forget that it used to be even worse. After all, 15 short years ago, pregnant people could legally be denied health insurance, just for being pregnant. Cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, mental illness, AIDS — all potentially disqualifying conditions, too. Or, if your health care plan did offer coverage…
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The last time the Democratic Party released a platform, mass death and illness were haunting the political landscape. By mid-August 2020, more than 160,000 United States citizens had died from COVID-19, and the daily mortality rate had just climbed above 1,000. Vaccines were still months away from being available, and nationwide cases exceeded 5.4 million. Inundated with corpses…
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“It’s this sort of dread that hangs over me,” says D. “The fact that medical care — even if I can pay for it — might just simply be denied me.” As a software engineer, D., who has asked to be identified by her first initial to avoid harassment, has stable circumstances and access to reasonably good health insurance. And yet, as a transgender woman in the United States, when she sought gender…
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As the only wealthy country without universal health care, the U.S. is a global outlier, with both the highest health care spending and the worst health outcomes across several metrics, a new report by the Commonwealth Fund confirms. A report released on Tuesday found that, in 2021, the latest year for which data is available, the U.S. spent 17.8 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on…
A universal health care system could have saved more than 338,000 lives in the United States by preventing roughly one in three deaths resulting from the COVID-19 infections through March 2022, according to a new study. A single-payer health care system would also have saved the nation an estimated $105.6 billion in health care costs associated with COVID treatments and hospitalizations, leading the study’s authors to conclude that universal health care, often called “Medicare for All,” is both a moral and financial imperative for policymakers.
Published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, the study and a companion analysis are a stunning indictment of what their authors describe as a “fragmented and inefficient” health care system that leaves millions of people uninsured and underinsured every year. Americans spend more money on health care than people living in any other nation, but the U.S. has sustained 16 percent of COVID’s global “mortality burden” while only representing 4 percent of the world’s population.
James Kahn, a professor of health policy at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-author of the study, said the modeling and analysis present a precise estimate of the massive human and financial costs “imposed on the U.S. population by the lack of universal insurance” during the pandemic. Even in non-pandemic years, a single-payer health system would save tens of thousands of people from preventable death annually.
“Placing the profits of private insurers over the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans is obscene,” Kahn said in a statement this week.
By comparing the risk of death from COVID and other conditions for the insured and uninsured populations, the researchers concluded that Medicare for All could have saved 131,438 people from dying of COVID over the course of 2020 alone, when the virus swept across the country and overwhelmed local hospitals and public health systems.
Before COVID, about 28 million people in the U.S. did not have health insurance, and another 9 million lost insurance coverage after losing their jobs during the pandemic. Millions more are underinsured and face high out-of-pocket costs for prescriptions and medical care. A recent investigation by media outlets found that 100 million people in the U.S. — about 41 percent of adults — are in debt due to unpaid medical bills.
People who are uninsured are more likely to develop preventable conditions such as type 2 diabetes because they typically do not have a primary doctor who can catch potential health problems early on. Such comorbidities can complicate a COVID infection and increase the risk of death, as does any delay in seeking medical care.
Uninsured (and underinsured) people are more likely to wait longer to seek treatment or attempt to avoid racking up medical bills altogether, and during a viral pandemic, that means they are also more likely to become seriously ill and transmit COVID-19 to others, according to the study. Lower-income and frontline workers may also show up to work sick if they worry about losing income or their employer’s health coverage, one reason why advocates say the government must guarantee paid sick leave for all workers along with health care.
Opponents of Medicare for All argue a single-payer system would be expensive, but once again researchers have concluded that privatized insurance and health care services are less efficient and require far more spending. After factoring in the cost of insuring everyone in the U.S., the study concludes that universal health care would produce a net savings of $438 billion in a typical, non-pandemic year. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, $459 billion in costs would have been saved along with so many lives.
In a comment published at Health Justice Monitor, Kahn said the study’s modeling determined that the current health care system wasted half a trillion dollars in 2020 thanks to “ongoing inefficiency.”
“Health care access leads to earlier diagnosis, with better treatment and reduced transmission, as well as stronger prevention such as higher vaccination rates,” Kahn wrote. “Promises of special insurance coverage for COVID fall short when individuals don’t know about it, and when implementation is seriously flawed. Fewer cases also mean lower hospital burdens that may compromise quality of care.”
Medicare for All would also reduce administrative costs by eliminating the maze of bureaucracy created by private insurance companies, which also deflect health care spending toward advertising and legal expenses. As the primary and universal provider of health coverage, the government would also have great negotiating power over the price of pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and related fees, which would promote market efficiency and bring costs down across the board.
Ann Keller, an associate professor of health policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that disturbing levels of preventable death during the pandemic may actually underestimate the costs of the current system’s failures. While the study looks at preventable comorbidities and other risks, it does not consider lower rates of chronic illness associated with single-payer systems in other countries.
“Having consistent access to care can prevent chronic disease from occurring and can ensure that patients who develop chronic disease have it better managed,” said Keller, who was not involved in the research, in an interview with Scientific American. “I would think that, if one took that into account, the estimates of avoided deaths would be greater than the numbers reported here.”
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The Senate Budget Committee will hold a hearing on Thursday to examine the economic and social benefits of implementing Medicare for All to combat the current health care crisis, Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) announced on Monday.
The COVID pandemic, which has claimed over 1 million lives in the U.S. so far, has highlighted the inequities in the U.S. health care system — which were already vast before the pandemic, Sanders wrote in a press release. The senator’s plea, which he has been making for years, is a familiar one: now, more than ever, the U.S. must catch up to every other wealthy country in the world and implement universal health care.
“Estimates show that nearly 27 million Americans and their families lost their health care coverage when they lost their jobs due to COVID-19,” Sanders said in a tweet on Tuesday. “Let me be clear: health care is a human right, not a job benefit. Yes. It’s time for Medicare for All.”
The hearing, entitled “Medicare for All: Protecting Health, Saving Lives, Saving Money,” will feature testimony from health and policy experts, as well as testimony from the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which has previously analyzed how a single-payer health care system would impact the U.S. budget.
As Sanders pointed out, the U.S. spends twice as much per capita on health care as the average wealthy country, but has the lowest life expectancy and fewer physician visits than in most other wealthy countries, according to The Commonwealth Fund. Over a quarter of the entire U.S. adult population is not insured or is underinsured because of the country’s highly exclusive private health care system; as a result, tens of thousands of Americans die each year because they either put off or don’t seek medical care when they need it, the press release says.
These inequities have been made starker by the pandemic. As tens of millions of families lost health insurance due to pandemic-related layoffs, unequal access to health insurance created large disparities in health outcomes between people who are insured and people who are uninsured.
Implementing Medicare for All would be immensely beneficial for health outcomes and equity in the U.S., the press release goes on — and it would also come with economic benefits.
“[E]stimates show that Medicare for All could save 68,000 lives per year, and numerous studies find that Medicare for All saves the American people and the U.S. health care system billions of dollars a year,” the press release says.
“According to the Congressional Budget Office, Medicare for All would save $650 billion each year, improve the economy, and eliminate all out-of-pocket health care costs,” the press release continues. “Even a study done by the right-wing Mercatus Center estimated that Medicare for All would save more than $2 trillion over a decade.”
In March, Sanders vowed that he would soon reintroduce his Medicare for All bill, which he has reintroduced several times over the past decade or so.
Lawmakers in the House have also been advocating for the proposal, and progressive representatives held the first pandemic-era hearing on the topic in March. Earlier this year, Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s (D-Washington) version of the bill gained a record 121 cosponsors in the House — far short of the roughly 218 votes needed to pass the House, but a sign that the idea is gaining momentum among the Democratic caucus.
The measure is popular among the public. According to a poll from Morning Consult/Politico last year, 55 percent of Americans support Medicare for All, while only 32 percent oppose it; a poll in 2020 by The Hill/HarrisX found that 69 percent of voters support Medicare for All.
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A new data analysis out Tuesday demonstrates that Covid-19 is now killing people at a significantly higher rate in the United States than in other rich countries, a grim reality that analysts have attributed to the nation’s lagging vaccination campaign and — more broadly — its fragmented for-profit healthcare system.
Citing figures from Johns Hopkins University, the World Bank, and the U.S. government, the New York Times reports that the country’s deaths during the ongoing Omicron wave “have now surpassed the worst days of the autumn surge of the Delta variant, and are more than two-thirds as high as the record tolls of last winter, when vaccines were largely unavailable.”
“Despite having one of the world’s most powerful arsenals of vaccines, the country has failed to vaccinate as many people as other large, wealthy nations. Crucially, vaccination rates in older people also lag behind certain European nations,” the Times noted. “The United States has fallen even further behind in administering booster shots, leaving large numbers of vulnerable people with fading protection as Omicron sweeps across the country.”
In addition to highlighting the role of rampant right-wing disinformation in vaccine hesitancy among many Americans, experts and commentators have pointed to structural barriers such as poverty, lack of paid sick leave, and massive levels of uninsurance as key factors hindering the U.S. pandemic response and driving up the coronavirus death toll. Research by the Kaiser Family Foundation has shown that unvaccinated Americans are more likely to be uninsured than vaccinated adults.
“Many more Americans would be vaccinated if our healthcare system wasn’t so terrifying,” healthcare journalist Natalie Shure argued in a column for The New Republic last year. “Though Congress passed legislation mandating that Covid-19 vaccines be free at the point of use for all U.S. residents, around one-third of unvaccinated people cited fear of cost as a significant reason they’ve yet to get the jab.”
“As it happens,” Shure noted, “patients across the country have been slapped with coronavirus-related medical bills throughout the pandemic, sometimes getting hit with steep charges for testing and treatment in spite of Congress’ mandates… Even if such events are rare, the startlingly widespread concern about it poses an undeniable threat to public health — and is just the latest illustration of the havoc wrought by a healthcare system that millions of people are too terrified to use.”
According to a study released in December by West Health and Gallup, 30% of U.S. adults reported skipping treatment for a health problem in the prior three months and nearly 60% said the pandemic heightened their concerns about healthcare costs.
“One in every 20 U.S. adults — an estimated 12.7 million people — report knowing a friend or family member who died this past year after not receiving treatment because they could not afford it,” the study found.
While the Times analysis doesn’t emphasize the potentially massive impact the for-profit U.S. healthcare system has had on the country’s vaccination effort and coronavirus death rate, the newspaper does point to economic factors, highlighting survey data which indicates that “the poorest Americans are the likeliest to remain unvaccinated, putting them at greater risk of dying from Covid.”
“You know what every country on this graph except for the USA has?” asked political anthropologist and physician Eric Reinhart in response to the Times analysis. “Universal healthcare guaranteed to every resident.”
“Almost seems like that might matter for public health and the trust in medicine, science, and government upon which public health depends,” Reinhart added.
Daniel Farber, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, added that the Times‘ data compilation spotlights “the dark side of American exceptionalism.”
On average, the coronavirus is killing an estimated 2,600 people every day in the U.S., a staggering figure that experts fear is becoming “normalized” among the country’s political establishment and population.
“If we want to declare the end of the pandemic right now, what we’re doing is normalizing a very high rate of death,” Anne Sosin, a health equity researcher at Dartmouth College, told the Times.
This is unbearable: "Since Dec. 1, when health officials announced the first Omicron case in the United States, the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is at least 63% higher than in any of these other large, wealthy nations" https://t.co/f2L8B4hH3t
— Dr Kathleen Bachynski (@bachyns) February 2, 2022
Progressives have argued throughout the pandemic that the privatized U.S. healthcare system — with its sky-high costs and countless barriers to treatment — left the country dangerously unprepared to combat the threat of Covid-19.
The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen estimated in a report last March that hundreds of thousands of coronavirus deaths likely would have been prevented if the U.S. had a single-payer, Medicare for All system.
“Under Medicare for All, everyone would have consistent coverage regardless of their employment status or employer,” the report argued. “And because Americans would have their choice of providers, instead of facing the narrow networks their employers choose for them, they would face fewer challenges getting care, especially during a pandemic where some hospitals and providers are overwhelmed by demand.”
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In an effort to expand healthcare access to tens of millions of Americans in the continuing absence of a more ambitious universal care program, more than 125 House Democrats on Friday introduced legislation that would lower the age of general Medicare eligibility from 65 to 60.
The bill — which is led by Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Conor Lamb (Pa.), Joe Neguse (Colo.), Susan Wild (Pa.), Haley Stevens (Mich.), and Debbie Dingell (Mich.) — would bring 23 million more Americans into the government-run program. The policy is supported by President Joe Biden, who — thought he continues to oppose Medicare for All — promised to lower the Medicare eligibility age during his 2020 presidential campaign.
Sponsors of the new proposal hope it will be included in the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill supported by Biden and progressive lawmakers — as well as a majority of U.S. voters. While both houses of Congress have passed the budget blueprint for the landmark package, congressional Democrats are facing an aggressive push by corporate lobbyists and right-wing colleagues from both sides of the aisle to eliminate or weaken crucial provisions.
Proponents of the Medicare expansion bill said it would save many lives.
“Lowering the Medicare eligibility age will not only be life-changing for at least 23 million people, it will also be lifesaving for so many across America who will finally be able to get the care they need and deserve,” Jayapal said in a statement announcing the new bill.
I’m proud to help lead this effort with @RepJayapal to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60.
Our proposal would provide high-quality affordable health care to at least 23 million Americans who are currently uninsured or underinsured. https://t.co/zr3tnFVr35
— Rep. Joe Neguse (@RepJoeNeguse) September 3, 2021
Researchers have found that there is a massive increase in the diagnosis of cancer among Americans who reach the age of 65 that could have been detected much earlier if they had access to Medicare.
Medicare eligibility expansion is also popular policy — and seen by many Americans, especially progressives, as a gateway to more ambitious healthcare reform. According to a Data for Progress survey in June, 60% of likely U.S. voters support lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60, while a March poll from Morning Consult found that 55% of respondents favor Medicare for All.
Many of the lawmakers who support the new bill are also co-sponsors of the Medicare for All Act of 2021, which was introduced by Jayapal and Dingell in March.
“We are the only industrialized nation that does not have guaranteed access to healthcare for all its citizens — this needs to change now,” Dingell said on Friday. “We’re working on ensuring universal healthcare, and this includes lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60 so that more adults can get the critical access to the quality, affordable healthcare they need.”
We have a historic opportunity to include Medicare expansion in the $3.5 trillion resolution package.
Medicare for All is still the goal, but we must seize this moment.
Please join us in calling these legislators today. pic.twitter.com/8buupyTdx3
— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) August 27, 2021
Healthcare advocacy groups welcomed the new bill.
“The creation of Medicare transformed the lives of seniors by guaranteeing them access to healthcare and eliminating healthcare bills that threw many into poverty,” Public Citizen president Robert Weissman said in a statement.
Weissman added that, if passed, the new bill “can have a similarly transformative effect on the lives of tens of millions of Americans, guaranteeing care, keeping people out of medical bankruptcy, and opening up life choices.”
Jayapal said that “expanding and improving” Medicare “is not only the right thing to do from a policy perspective, it is also what the majority of Americans across party lines support.”
“Congress and President Biden,” she added, “should immediately deliver for the people by prioritizing the expansion and improvement of Medicare in the upcoming Build Back Better package.”
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In 2008 and 2009, Rory Fanning walked across the entire United States in memory of Pat Tillman, the former NFL-player-turned-Army Ranger who was killed by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan in 2004. Fanning had served beside Tillman during Fanning’s first tour in Afghanistan. During his second tour, he became a war resister by refusing to carry arms.
Fanning’s first Afghanistan tour was bloody and illuminating; he realized the U.S. invasion and occupation was a human rights catastrophe that made the world a much more dangerous place. During his second tour, Fanning dropped out of the Army as a conscientious objector just days after the U.S. military attempted to cover up the cause of Tillman’s death in a propaganda effort to portray the athlete as a war hero. If not for the ensuing media attention, Fanning says, the military may have simply thrown him in jail.
Instead, Fanning returned to the U.S., where the activist and author penned two books and spent years talking to high school students about the grim reality of serving in the U.S. military — a reality students would never hear about from military recruiters. Now, as the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan comes to a chaotic close, Fanning reflects on 20 years of the war on terror, and how anti-racist activism and the push for free college tuition and universal health care can help stem the tide of U.S. imperialism around the world.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity, you can listen to the full interview at the top of the page.
Mike Ludwig: What has been your initial reaction to the latest news out of Afghanistan?
Rory Fanning: Well, it’s mixed emotions. Obviously, I’m happy to see the United States getting out of Afghanistan; [it] should’ve never been there in the first place. But it’s also horrifying seeing all of the people that we’re leaving behind. My thoughts have been: How can I help get these people out? And not just the people who have facilitated the occupation in Afghanistan, but all Afghans. All Afghans deserve a place to go after the United States occupied their country and helped turn it into a pile of rubble in many ways.
Sure. So, you’d like to see maybe a greater refugee relocation effort or more resources for anyone there who’s seeking help?
Yes. Obviously, this should have been done before we withdrew. There should have been a game plan set up and ready to be implemented or implemented already. But yeah, everybody who wants to leave Afghanistan should be able to leave Afghanistan and the U.S. has an obligation to take care of each and every one of those individuals.
Do you want to just go back a little bit and talk about some of your experience there, maybe some of the people you met and why, when you look at the current situation, you think it’s so important for us to be supportive — not just of people who facilitated the occupation, but anyone who feels perhaps threatened by the Taliban?
The United States has been meddling with Afghanistan for the past 40 years, if not more years. And we’ve brought in warlords who are otherwise out of the country, to basically help carry out the U.S. mission, which was not about freedom and democracy or even nation-building, but rather a counterterrorism effort.
And I saw firsthand that Afghanistan is probably one of the poorest countries on the planet. And so, you see this occupying force coming in with suitcases full of money, saying, “identify a member of the Taliban,” and so people who have no money would say, “Oh there, there’s a member of the Taliban right over there.” And we’d fly in and land in their front yard with night vision on and take out a military-age male, put a bag over their heads and take them off to a place like Guantanamo or the like. We later find out that the person that we had taken wasn’t a member of the Taliban or wasn’t a member of an extremist organization, to use the parlance of the U.S. government, but rather just someone who owed his landlord some money. And the landlord saw the U.S. military coming in with bags full of cash as an opportunity to not only get paid, but also get rid of a problem tenant…. So often we were little more than pawns in village disputes.
Or we’d have rockets land in our camp, and we didn’t necessarily see where they came from specifically. So, we’d call in, you know, a 500-pound bomb airstrike on a village and there would be mass casualties. And we know now that more than 80 percent of all those who have died since 9/11 in Afghanistan have been innocent civilians.
So, people who couldn’t even point to Manhattan on the map suddenly had a vested interest in learning about the United States and in many ways, getting revenge on the United States for killing their brother, their sister, their mother, their father, their infant child.
I signed for the military hoping to help prevent another 9/11-type attack, and I saw that I was only creating the conditions for more such attacks. The world is a much more dangerous place as a result of our invasion of Afghanistan.
Absolutely. A lot of the counterinsurgency strategy was to win “hearts and minds” on the ground — after, as you said, so much of life had been disrupted by invasion and occupation. Was there a particular time in your service that you said, “I think I’m opposed to this and I want to become a resister?”
Well, I entered the country a few months after the Taliban surrendered in early 2002. I didn’t know that, at the time, our job was essentially to bring the Taliban back into the fight. The surrender wasn’t good enough for the United States. They wanted revenge for 9/11. Politicians back home wanted revenge for 9/11, I think that was part of it.
But I also think it was an opportunity to create this ubiquitous enemy and maintain Cold War-era military budgets, and, you know, maintain control of the region, or at least think [we] were. And so, I went into the country and realized that we had absolutely no understanding of the culture, no understanding of the language. We didn’t really even care who we were targeting in many ways. What was it about? I mean, to even say that I knew what it was about would be kind of a disservice.
I do think [the mission] was in large part to bring the Taliban back into the fight. And I think that’s what we did. And we know that so many members of the Taliban now are people who were victims of bombings, U.S. bombings, or warlords that we brought into the country. And people who have no other options — it’s not like you go work in an office somewhere in Afghanistan — turn to the Taliban as a place to put food on the table in many ways.
I felt like a bully in Afghanistan. Like I said, I wanted to make the world a safer place, but saw that [the U.S. military] was making it more dangerous. And I didn’t really see if there was an attempt to build schools. If there was an attempt to look out for people, particularly in the countryside, or create an infrastructure in Afghanistan where they could have roads. I haven’t seen any of that.
What is the timeframe of your service in Afghanistan and also for becoming a war resister? What did that look like for you?
I went in after [the U.S. had been in Afghanistan for] a few months, I think it was 2002 toward the tail end of that year. I was really overwhelmed by the level of poverty and the destruction that had been left over from the Soviet occupation of the country.
And we were occupying schools. Some guy, you know, some military-age man with his friend walked by and didn’t show the proper level of deference, and we put one guy in one room and the other guy in another room, and the guy sitting by himself would hear a gunshot, and we’d walk in and ask him if there was anything he wanted to tell us. This was just a desperate attempt to glean information, and it was terrorizing the Afghan population.
And, you know, like I said, that the 500-pound bombs, the lack of understanding of culture, which led us into these ridiculous, horrible situations where you’re taking people off to secret prisons, and then just the general sense of feeling like a bully. As I said, this is not making the world a safer place. It’s making the world a more dangerous place.
I decided, after my first tour, that I was going to become a war resister. And they said, “No, you’re coming back with us to Afghanistan.” And I said, okay, well I refuse to hold, carry a weapon. And so, I kind of walked with the donkeys in remote regions of Afghanistan on my second tour for about four months.
Fascinating. Do you have any impressions of the country that you got from that experience? I feel like we don’t hear enough in the media about what life is like in Afghanistan, especially in the rural areas. We hear a lot about drugs. We hear a lot about war, but we don’t hear that much about what life is like.
Like anywhere in the world, I think 99.9 percent of the population are incredible people. Most people are good, no matter where you go in the country, I was really struck by the sense of community that I saw. When you have conversations with people they’re really engaged. There was a lack of insecurity that you see when you’re having a conversation with many Americans, [a] lack of self-consciousness. There was a real presence in my interactions with Afghans. And I was envious of [the] sense of community that they had.
So yeah, my experience with Afghans, at least when we were going into towns, was just one of a kind of appreciation for who they were and their community…. I mean, there was obviously a resistance, but they’re very hospitable in the sense that they’d have dinners waiting for us, and they’d have rice and yeah, maybe it was because of pressure, but maybe it was because of just a general sense of hospitality. I felt like most Afghans that I interacted with were far healthier than the occupying force that had visited their country.
At some point, that second tour where you refused to carry a gun came to an end and you came back to the U.S. — and then did you join the antiwar movement? Were you involved in organizing?
It took me a while to kind of settle into that. I came from a fairly right-wing Catholic family who liked the idea that they had a freedom fighter in the family. And so, when I got back, I kind of kept a lot of it to myself, and I spent about five years working in a cubicle, doing what I didn’t want to do … and realizing that I was kind of a half of a person in this process. And I felt like I had to shake things up and eventually, you know, speak about my experiences.
So, I decided to walk across the United States for the Pat Tillman foundation. Pat and his brother Kevin were two of the only people in the military that supported my decision when I became a war resister. And in large part, I didn’t go to jail because of the way Pat died, because they just wanted me out of the unit. You know, the reason they wanted me out of the military at the time, it was because they were covering up his death. I guess they didn’t want the added pressure of someone who was questioning the mission. I felt like on a lot of levels, I owed Pat something. So, I walked across the United States for his foundation.
You said that the Army was interested in covering up Pat Tillman’s death, so you kind of got a pass, and you were in the same unit?
Yes. In the 2nd Ranger Battalion.
What was the reason they were trying to cover it up? What was the story around his death and why the military was so concerned?
Well, first, they tried to make Pat into the poster boy for the war on terror. If someone could give up a $3.6 million NFL contract to go and serve in the military and defend freedom and democracy, then you can too! And this made Pat obviously very uncomfortable, but this is what the U.S. was trying to do.
And so, when they ended up killing Pat in an act of friendly fire, they wanted to cover it up. They burned his uniform and his diary and covered it all the way up to the highest levels of the Bush administration. At the very least, Donald Rumsfeld knew, most likely George Bush knew about it. And, then it all came out.
It was bad PR for the military, really bad PR, because they had used Pat Tillman as a propaganda point.
Exactly.
So, you walked across the country. I imagine that at this point, you were starting to engage in the antiwar movement. And I remember being an activist in the movement and meeting a lot of veterans, both from Afghanistan and Iraq, who’d either become resisters, or after their tours became antiwar activists. And I fear that a lot of their contributions at the time have now been lost in the media. I’m curious about your experience in the antiwar movement and with other veterans who may have agreed with you and organized with you.
Yeah, well, I mean, even after I finished walking across the country, I was still scared to share my story. And it wasn’t until I kind of retraced my steps via history books and saw all of these war resisters of different kinds along my path that I actually didn’t even know about when I was walking. I walked where Ida B. Wells wrote her anti-lynching papers, where the San Patricio Battalion refused to fight Mexicans in the Mexican-American War, where Dolores Huerta organized. And these were kind of war resisters of a different kind, and if they could do what they did, then I could certainly share my story. And so, once I read about these histories, that motivated me to kind of want to get out and meet other people who felt betrayed by the U.S. military, and there are plenty of them out there.
In addition to all the dissenters, the people who’ve left the military and have spoken out after the fact, according to some estimates there’s as many as 80,000 war resisters, people who refuse to fight after entering the military based on what they saw in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. So, there’s quite a number of people out there, it’s just … there’s not a lot of space for dissenting voices to speak out and do their thing.
I realized that getting into high schools was actually a very important thing. There’s more than 10,000 recruiters stalking the [school] hallways around the country, sharing very little about what is actually happening in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I wanted to fill in some of those blanks in high schools. So, the Chicago Teacher’s Union gave me a grant to go in and speak to as many high schools as I could, and that was actually very difficult because even with the grant, most people see the military as a positive option for young people, particularly in places like the South and West Side of Chicago, where there are not a ton of options after graduation.
I found a lot of community and comfort in meeting other antiwar veterans.
I’m so glad you brought that up, because my entry into the antiwar movement was in high school. I was a freshman when 9/11 happened and began doing counter-recruiting activism in whatever limited ways I could as a high school student. And I not only met antiwar activists that way, but I met veterans as well. I saw veterans as so crucial to the antiwar movement; their experiences were truth to be told in this country. But I also remember the antiwar movement being very factionalized at the time and not everybody seeming to be on board with veterans, possibly because their politics didn’t quite match up. Did you have any problems like that with the movement itself where you didn’t feel welcome for some reason, because you had participated in the war?
I feel like there was a discomfort around some people in the movement, I think there were certain situations where that was the case. I think people with slightly more sophisticated politics were able to see beyond that someone would sign up for the military and actually look a little deeper as to why they would sign up for the military, given the billion-dollar-a-year-propaganda budget the U.S. military has. You know, just the lack of education in schools when it comes to talking about the history of U.S. imperialism — and also giving people the opportunity to change their minds based on what they saw.
I think it’s important for people to be able to hear the voice, the experience of veterans, particularly those who are considering entering the military. You have people just going in and wagging their fingers, saying, “Don’t join the military. It’s a horrible thing.” You know, that’s one thing. And I should say, there needs to be more of that in high schools — but I think you’re more likely to communicate something to a high school-age person if you’ve actually lived it and say, “This is actually why you should think twice about joining the military. Killing someone for a cause that you don’t understand is the worst thing you could possibly do, it’s maybe better to die yourself than to kill someone for a cause you don’t understand.” And then be able to speak [from] a position of authority in that regard. I think it’s hard to replicate that.
Are there any political messages that you would like to get out, that you would draw from all these experiences … now that it’s been about 10 years since the media has had a serious discussion about Afghanistan?
Well, I signed up thinking the United States was a force for good around the world and actually cared about things like freedom and democracy. I realized that that certainly wasn’t the case, and U.S. imperialism is something that benefits a small percentage of the population at the great expense of everyone else. And then there are certain tools that need to be implemented in order to have enough people sign on — to stock the approximately 800 military bases the United States has around the world.
And I think there are xenophobia and racism … this belief that the United States is superior, and that the mission of the United States, which largely is rooted in white supremacy, is the best alternative — that we need to be the police of the world.
I’ve seen some of the mechanisms that allow for endless wars and trillion-dollar-a-year military budgets, and I’ve also come to see some of the ways that we can fight it without necessarily directly being part of the antiwar movement…. There are other ways that you can fight it, like advocating for free education and free health care. I mean, that’s a major blow to U.S. imperialism — when people aren’t signing up for the military because they don’t have to, because they don’t need to have their college paid for or have health care, so they don’t have to do a job that they don’t want [to be] guaranteed healthcare.
If you really care about climate change, you need to go after the people that are most responsible for it. The U.S. military is one of the greatest polluters on the planet, if not the greatest polluter on the planet.
I’m still wondering the best way to challenge U.S. imperialism. It’s certainly not an easy thing, but I think it’s crucial if we’re going to solve a lot of the problems like free education, free healthcare, building a better sustainable infrastructure in the United States, and I don’t know, fighting climate change.
And also, being an anti-racist is at the core of it. I mean, it is very hard to go convince someone to kill somebody if they are anti-racist. If they see that they have much more in common with ordinary people in Afghanistan or North Korea than they do the people telling them to go and fight those people. So, fighting Islamophobia, fighting anti-Black racism here in the United States, those are all part of the ways that we can challenge U.S. imperialism.
Just because we pulled out of Afghanistan doesn’t mean U.S. imperialism is over. As you mentioned, the U.S. has hundreds of bases all across the world. Do you have any thoughts about the future?
Yeah, well, I mean, [imperialism] walks side by side with capitalism. The U.S. ruling class is constantly looking for new markets to exploit, more resources to steal, and ways to dominate other powers around the world. As long as profit is the main concern of those who are running the show, you can expect the empire to continue to fight and look for those markets and do so in extremely violent ways.
In the American Prospect, there’s a really great article by Rozina Ali about how the law is kind of constantly manipulated, changed, and interpreted in a way that makes endless war lawful — to support things like the drone wars, endless wars, things like Guantanamo Bay. I mean, war should technically adapt to the law, but it’s usually the opposite. So, I think there’s going to be constant attempts to manipulate [the law] and justify drone strikes and secret prisons and 800 military bases around the world. The ruling class will use every trick in the book in order to convince people that what they’re doing is okay. There used to be big debates around military conflicts, you know, particularly in lead up to World War II or World War I, but there is [little] of that debate anymore. It’s whether things are lawful or not, and you can manipulate the law to make everything justified, or allowed. And I think that’s what we’re seeing. And I think we’ll continue to see that.
One of the things that Chelsea Manning showed was how vetted the media is when it comes to covering wars. I think there were seven journalists inside of Iraq, behind “enemy lines,” at the time. And so, people aren’t seeing what’s going on around the world, they don’t know that the United States has had military operations in nearly all of the African countries since 2011 alone.
But I think it’s really important for places like Truthout and other independent outlets to cover this stuff and let people know that they’re still spending a trillion dollars a year on the military, and that trillion dollars a year isn’t going toward the infrastructure, it’s not going toward education. It’s lining the pockets of people who are already rich.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Parasites attach themselves to your body and suck your blood to feed themselves. Most, like ticks and mosquitos, while they may provide food for birds, bats and other animals, seem to provide no direct benefit at all to humans.
That “no benefit” equation goes double for the latest parasites who have attached themselves to the backs of Americans and are rapidly draining us of our economic blood: health insurance companies.
There is quite literally no reason for these corporations to exist, at least when it comes to providing for the health needs of 99 percent of Americans.
Virtually every other developed country in the world has a universal healthcare system to provide for the needs of all of their citizens. The one exception is Switzerland, where everyone is required to purchase health insurance, but all the primary health insurance companies must operate as nonprofits and the federal government pays the premiums for low income and poor people.
Other developed countries typically have a few health insurance companies around but mostly they serve the very wealthy, insuring that if they become sick or injured they get private suites in the hospital or have jet- and helicopter-based air ambulance service when out of country. In a few countries they fill in cracks, like for dental or eyeglasses. But, other than Switzerland, that’s it.
Severe parasite infections can inhibit a host’s ability to respond to disease, and that’s just what’s happening to America right now as we’ve faced and continue to face the Covid pandemic. More than half of all Americans who’ve become infected with Covid and survived are now “struggling with medical debt” as a result of their illness, according to a new study by The Commonwealth Fund.
Even people who didn’t get Covid are being wiped out by medical debt:
Think about the people who live around you, on your street or in your apartment building. Imagine one out of every five of them, from the very old to newborns, having already had their medical debt turned over to another parasitic American industry, debt collectors.
One in five Americans. Today. Are in collection for medical debt. Getting harassing phone calls day and night. Having their checking accounts garnished, their credit and ability to get a new job ruined for years or decades. One in every five people in America. And every one of their lives has been turned upside-down because they or their child got sick.
We are the only developed country in the world that does this to its citizens, and the only reason we do it is so people like Bill McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth, can walk away with, literally, a billion dollars.
Meanwhile, the University of Chicago finds that 8 million Americans have started a crowdfunding page to raise money to cover their own medical bills, and an additional 12 million pages have been started by others trying to pay bills of friends, relatives, children or grandparents who aren’t computer literate.
One third of all GoFundMe and similar sites are people trying to raise money to pay for medical bills not covered by insurance companies. Families like George Fushi’s are desperately turning to the contributions of friends and even strangers to simply avoid homelessness.
A City University of New York/Harvard study found that the number one cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt; it averages over a half-million families wiped out this way every year. The number of people in Canada, all of western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan who went bankrupt exclusively from medical debt last year: Zero.
As Michael Hiltzik writes for the Los Angeles Times: “It’s also virtually unique to the U.S. among developed countries; when experts from Japan and Europe were asked by the PBS program ‘Frontline’ about the prevalence of medical bankruptcy in their countries, some had trouble even comprehending the question.”
Poll after poll shows that a solid majority — 60 to 80 percent, depending on how the question is phrased — want America’s legislators to put a national healthcare system in place or give people an easy and inexpensive option to buy into our biggest single payer system, Medicare.
And, indeed, we still have two single-payer systems left over from LBJ’s Great Society programs in the 1960s that were able to get passed just a decade before the US Supreme Court legalized political bribery and corruption: Medicare and Medicaid.
Medicare, of course, pays for healthcare for people over 65, and Medicaid covers healthcare costs for low-income working people, the profoundly poor and elderly folks in nursing homes. The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid coverage to all low-income Americans…until five “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court changed the law to let individual states decide if their citizens deserved it.
Twelve states today deny Medicaid to many or most of their low-income working citizens even though the federal government pays for almost all of it. Every single one’s legislature is run entirely by Republicans: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
That’s no coincidence: the GOP has been the party of billionaires and predatory corporations ever since Warren Harding’s election in 1920, when it turned its back on Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and purged the Party of its progressives.
They then spent the past four decades stacking the federal court system and the Supreme Court with partisan hacks and prostitutes to big money and big business so they could continue their bloody business of extracting cash from working people and shoveling it into the money bins of the morbidly rich.
But it’s not just low-income people who are being sucked dry by our medical industry. The study by Commonwealth Fund found that fully a third of insured Americans under 65 had difficulties paying off medical debt last year. The same was true for half of uninsured Americans under 65 just in the past year.
In my new book The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, I lay out how the average American is paying around $3000 a year more for healthcare and health insurance than Canadians, Europeans, Japanese and South Koreans.
That money is lining of the pockets of the literally thousands of health industry executives who each “earn” over a million dollars a year (some “earning” tens or hundreds of millions a year). We pay 24 percent of our GDP for healthcare and healthcare insurance.
By comparison, Taiwan’s singly-payer healthcare system in its entirety, including doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, all care facilities, all billing and payment operations — everything — costs that country just a bit over 6 percent of GDP. In most developed countries it’s 6 to 14 percent.
Insurance premiums make up 24 percent of gross US payroll, while a Canadian-style nonprofit Medicare-For-All system would cost between 10 and 14 percent depending on how it was implemented.
And every effort Democrats make to deal with the problem — including their most recent “infrastructure” bill that would cut drug prices and expand Medicaid to those 12 states that have refused to do so themselves — faces 100% rigid opposition from bought-and-paid-for elected Republicans.
Meanwhile, the healthcare industry has funded literally hundreds of websites and “advocacy” organizations that have flooded the internet with lies and misinformation about how healthcare is done around the world or the “horrors of single-payer.” Just try googling the issue and you’ll find the majority of the top hits come from these sources: the industry is readying for war.
As Covid sweeps across America with a fourth wave, this time hitting the Red states and counties hardest because their unvaccinated citizens have been listening to Republican politicians and watching Fox “News,” medical bankruptcies are starting to explode.
The only way to deal with parasites is to remove them from their host. It’s time to expand Medicare to full coverage in all regards for all Americans so we can dislodge these healthcare parasites from our body politic.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
There’s only one person in this photograph/video of last week’s G7 meeting who represents a country where an illness can destroy an entire family, leaving them bankrupt and homeless, with the repercussions of that sudden fall into poverty echoing down through generations.
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.
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, whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10%.
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. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all proposed and made an effort to bring a national healthcare system to the United States. Here’s one example really worth watching (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 newest 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 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 almost every other “developed” country in the world. 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, 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 hell of an effort, but the health insurance industry was then a tiny fraction of its current size.
In 1978, when conservatives on the Supreme Court legalized corporations owning politicians with their Buckley v Belotti 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-conservative vote 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 is producing 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.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“I couldn’t have survived if I was in America.”
That’s what one woman concluded in a video published Wednesday by the New York Times’ opinion section, after recounting the weeks she spent in the hospital as a child being treated for a brain virus.
She was just one of several people from around the world who participated in the Times project. Throughout the video, residents of Canada, Finland, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom respond to the high costs of healthcare in the for-profit U.S. system.
The United States is the only industrialized country in the world without universal health coverage. While the stars of the Times video were shocked and outraged upon learning how much care costs in the so-called “land of the free,” progressives in the U.S. responded with calls for Medicare for All.
We need Medicare for All. https://t.co/BtTN9cdGuw
— Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) April 28, 2021
“No one in America should vote for politicians who choose to subject us to this,” Briahna Joy Gray tweeted in response to the video. The Bad Faith podcast co-host and Current Affairs contributing editor served as press secretary to the 2020 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a longtime champion of Medicare for All.
In the video, residents of various countries reviewed some private health insurance options for U.S. residents and tried to make sense of terms like copay, deductible, and OOP max, which stands for out-of-pocket maximum, or the highest amount of money enrollees have to pay annually for healthcare services covered by their plan.
People for Bernie, which grew out of Sanders’ 2016 run for president, also shared the video and asserted that the “acceptable OOP max is $0.”
The acceptable OOP Max is $0 #MedicareForAll https://t.co/T83V87tk90 pic.twitter.com/tWBpziY5Bn
— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) April 28, 2021
Some people in the U.S. praised the video as “so, so good” and “very well done.” Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats called it an “excellent video about the cruelty and inefficiency of our healthcare system.”
Others echoed the outrage of video participants. As NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue put it: “The definition of insanity is this.”
In the video, a man in Sweden contrasts the healthcare system in his country with that of the United States. “To know that I can get sick, I can get injured, but I will still be taken care of, that is freedom,” he says. “This is not freedom.”
Despite conclusions from policymakers and medical experts — including a Lancet panel in February — that “single-payer, Medicare for All reform is the only way forward,” President Joe Biden has made clear he opposes that path to universal coverage.
Biden unveiled his American Families Plan early Wednesday. Despite pressure from progressives in the House and Senate as well as dozens of advocacy groups, he declined to include an expansion of Medicare and drug pricing reforms in the plan.
Ahead of Biden’s Wednesday night address to Congress, Sanders declared in a video from his Senate office that “we’ve got to deal with healthcare.”
“We remain the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right,” he said. “We pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We have got to summon up the courage to take on the healthcare industry, the pharmaceutical industry.”
“My own view, as you know, is that we need a Medicare for All, single-payer system,” the Senate Budget Committee chair added, expressing hope that lawmakers can begin that process by expanding the program — by both lowering the eligibility age from 65 and including dental, hearing, and vision benefits.
“We pay for that by demanding that Medicare start negotiating prescription drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry,” Sanders explained, citing estimates that the reform would raise $450 billion over a decade.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Amid a deadly pandemic that has further exposed the absurdity and immorality of tying health insurance to employment, Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Debbie Dingell are planning to introduce the Medicare for All Act of 2021 this coming Wednesday — exactly one year after the first coronavirus cases were confirmed in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
The bill’s official introduction, set for March 17, “is an attempt to link the cause of universal care with the devastation wrought by the pandemic,” Politico reported.
“Mark your calendars!” tweeted Jayapal (D-Wash.), a longtime single-payer advocate who was the lead House sponsor of the Medicare for All Act of 2019, which experts at the time characterized as the gold standard for universal healthcare legislation. The bill proposed a two-year transition to a Medicare for All system that would provide comprehensive healthcare to everyone in the U.S. for free at the point of service.
Since the coronavirus crisis began last year, millions of people across the U.S. have been thrown off their employer-provided health insurance — the nation’s most common form of coverage — due to pandemic-induced mass layoffs that have persisted in recent weeks. Last week, an additional 1.2 million people in the U.S. filed for unemployment insurance.
“This past year makes it incredibly clear why we must pass Medicare for All,” said Nina Turner, a Democratic congressional candidate in Ohio’s 11th District.
Mark your calendars!https://t.co/DutW79bKBB
— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) March 11, 2021
While progressives such as Jayapal and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have called for an expansion of Medicare to cover the newly uninsured — and everyone else — for the duration of the pandemic, congressional Democrats went a different route in the newly passed American Rescue Plan, which significantly expands eligibility for Affordable Care Act subsidies and fully covers private premiums under COBRA, an expensive program that lets laid-off workers stay on their employer-provided insurance.
Speaking to the New York Times last week, Jayapal — the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — made clear her disagreement with that approach.
“I don’t think this was the most efficient way to do this,” Jayapal said of the American Rescue Plan’s expansion of private insurance.
The nearly $2 trillion relief package, which President Joe Biden — a Medicare for All opponent — signed into law on Thursday, also includes funding to incentivize states to expand Medicaid, an offer that’s unlikely to be taken up by Republican governors.
Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy organization, tweeted in response to the coming introduction of the latest iteration of the Medicare for All Act that “tying healthcare to employment was ridiculous and cruel before the pandemic.”
“And now, with millions more Americans unemployed, it’s horrific,” the group said. “We must guarantee healthcare as a human right — not as an employment benefit. We need Medicare for All.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.