Posted on

Recent Study Confirms US Ranks Dead Last in Healthcare Outcomes

Medicare for all.

That very phrase has the potential to produce several very palpable responses.

Republicans are, naturally, opposed to it since it promises to circumvent the private health insurance industry’s profit motive.

Many right-of-center Democrats–some of whom accept money from the same private health insurance industry–are still reticent to support it despite a 2018 Reuters-Ipsos poll showing 70% of respondents favor a single-payer national healthcare system and over 100 Democratic lawmakers support the “Medicare for All Act of 2021“.

There is no shortage of strawman arguments against it.

They range from “We can’t afford it” to “We have the best healthcare system in the world” to “It will bring us Soviet-style Socialism!”

There is also no shortage of counterarguments to knock down every one of those claims.

Let’s first examine the reductive “We can’t afford it” fallacy.

That claim is seldom if ever proposed whenever we feel the need to increase the military budget, print money to provide $2 trillion in economic relief to keep corporations afloat, dole out perpetual subsidies to the world’s most profitable corporations, or permanently cut taxes on those same corporations and their overlords to the tune of $1.5 trillion.

Those who cry poverty are often the same who also boast about us being the richest nation in the world.

They can’t have it both ways.

We have always been able to afford to provide every man, woman, and child born in this country healthcare as a human right.

Consider that over the past dozen or so years we have spent in the neighborhood between $20-35 trillion on corporate bailouts.

All that time we could have been providing healthcare.

Journalist David Sirota, in his newsletter TMI, wrote:

“We’ve seen health care industry CEOs report paying themselves $2.4 billion as 27 million people were thrown off their health care coverage. We’ve also seen Americans being charged anywhere from $400,000 to $1.1 million for COVID treatment, and facing $2,000 bills for coronavirus tests. And yet, despite data showing that a single-payer system would save big money, surveys still indicate some popular trepidation about the price tag of government-sponsored health care.”

 What’s the price tag?

Right now, combining Medicare, Medicaid, insurance premiums, and out-of-pocket costs, we are expected to spend about 

$52 trillion read more