single-payer health

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primary 420 after division setback warren in primary, also COVID

doh see anti-commie target

SEE MEDICARE FOR ALL

see happiness

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AN 2 25

'Diseases of despair': Rural Americans don’t live as long as those in cities - Alternet.org

Rural Americans – particularly men – are expected to live significantly shorter, less healthy lives than their urban counterparts, according to our research, recently published in the Journal of Rural Health.

We found that a 60-year-old man living in a rural area is expected on average to live two fewer years than an urban man. For women, the rural-urban gap is six months.

A key reason is worse rates among rural people for smoking, obesity and chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and heart disease. These conditions are condemning millions to disability and shortened lives.

What’s more, these same people live in areas where medical care is evaporating. Living in rural areas, with their relatively sparse populations, often means a shortage of doctors, longer travel distances for medical care and inadequate investments in public health, driven partly by declines in economic opportunities.

Our team arrived at these findings by using a simulation called the Future Elderly Model. With that, we were able to simulate the future life course of Americans currently age 60 living in either an urban or rural area.

The model is based on relationships observed in 20 years of data from the Health and Retirement Study, an ongoing survey that follows people from age 51 through the rest of their lives. Specifically, the model showed how long these Americans might live, the expected quality of their future years, and how certain changes in lifestyle would affect the results.

We describe the conditions that drive our results as “diseases of despair,” building off the landmark work of pioneering researchers who coined the now widely used term “deaths of despair.” They documented rising mortality among Americans without a college degree and related these deaths to declines in social and economic prospects.

The main causes of deaths of despair – drug overdoses, liver disease and suicide – have also been called “diseases of despair.” But the conditions we study, such as heart disease, could similarly be influenced by social and economic prospects. And they can profoundly reduce quality of life.

We also found that if rural education levels were as high as in urban areas, this would eliminate almost half of the rural-urban life-expectancy gap. Our data shows 65% of urban 60-year-olds were educated beyond high school, compared with 53% of rural residents the same age.

One possible reason for the difference is that getting a bachelor’s degree may make a person more able or willing to follow scientific recommendations – and more likely to work out for 150 minutes a week or eat their veggies as their doctor advises them to.Rural communities are increasingly hampered by their lack of access to health care.

Why it matters

The gap between urban and rural health outcomes has widened over recent decades. Yet the problem goes beyond disparities between urban and rural health: It also splits down some of the party lines and social divides that separate U.S. citizens, such as education and lifestyle.

Scholarship on the decline of rural America suggests that people living outside larger cities are resentful of the economic forces that may have eroded their economic power. The interplay between these forces and the health conditions we study are less appreciated.

Economic circumstances can contribute to health outcomes. For example, increased stress and sedentary lifestyle due to joblessness can contribute to chronic health issues such as cardiovascular disease. Declines in economic prospects due to automation and trade liberalization are linked to increases in mortality.

But health can also have a strong influence on economic outcomes. Hospitalizations cause high medical costs, loss of work and earnings, and increases in bankruptcy. The onset of chronic disease and disability can lead to long-lasting declines in income. Even health events experienced early in childhood can have economic consequences decades later.

In tandem, these health and economic trends might reinforce each other and help fuel inequality between rural and urban areas that produces a profoundly different quality of life.

What still isn’t known

It should be noted that our results, like many studies, are describing outcomes on average; the rural population is not a monolith. In fact, some of the most physically active and healthy people we know live in rural areas.

Just how much your location affects your health is an ongoing area of research. But as researchers begin to understand more, we can come up with strategies to promote health among all Americans, regardless of where they live.

*:{The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and Professor of Public Policy, University of Southern California; Bryan Tysinger, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management, University of Southern California, and Jack Chapel, Postdoctoral Scholar in Economics, University of Southern California

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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AN 1225

US Sen. Rick Scott, former CEO of the company that was at the center of the biggest Medicare fraud scheme in American history, has emerged as the most vocal Republican proponent of healthcare reform, warning his fellow GOP lawmakers that continued refusal to engage with the issue risks a “slow creep” toward single-payer healthcare.

On Thursday, according to Axios, Scott (R-Fla.) is “convening a group of House and Senate conservatives on Capitol Hill to pore over fresh polling to develop GOP alternatives to the Affordable Care Act.”

Late last month, Scott unveiled his own proposal titled the More Affordable Care Act, which would keep ACA exchanges intact while creating “Trump Health Freedom Accounts” that enrollees could use to pay for out-of-pocket costs. Scott’s plan, as the health policy group KFF explained, would allow enhanced ACA tax credits to expire and let states replace subsidies in the original ACA with contributions to the newly created health savings accounts.

“Unlike ACA premium tax credits, which can only be used for ACA Marketplace plans, the accounts in the Scott proposal could be used for any type of health insurance plan, including short-term plans that can exclude people based on preexisting conditions,” KFF noted. “States could also waive certain provisions of the ACA, including the requirement to cover certain benefits.”

“While ACA plans would still be required to cover people with preexisting conditions under the Scott proposal,” the group added, “it is likely that the ACA marketplace would collapse in states that seek a waiver under his approach.”

Last month, amid the longest government shutdown in US history, Scott leapt at the opportunity to champion possible Republican alternatives to the healthcare status quo, despite his ignominious record.

In 2003, the US Justice Department announced that the hospital chain HCA Inc.—formerly known as Columbia/HCA—had agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and damages to settle what the DOJ characterized as the “largest healthcare fraud case in US history.”

Scott resigned as CEO of Columbia/HCA in 1997, days after federal agents raided company facilities as part of the sweeping fraud probe. The federal government and company whistleblowers said the hospital giant “systematically defrauded” Medicare, Medicaid, and other healthcare programs through unlawful billing and other ploys.

“In 2000, Scott invoked the Fifth Amendment 75 times in a deposition as part of a civil case involving his time leading the company,” Florida Phoenix reported last year. A former HCA accountant accused Scott, who was never directly charged in the case, of leading “a criminal enterprise.”

Scott later served two terms as governor of Florida and is now one of the wealthiest members of Congress, and he maintains he was the victim of a politically motivated DOJ investigation.

“The Clinton Justice Department went after me,” Scott complained during his 2024 Senate reelection campaign.

It’s unclear whether Scott’s healthcare ideas will gain sufficient traction with President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers, who have seemed content to bash the existing system without proposing anything concrete or viable to replace it. Trump was supposed to unveil his own healthcare proposal last month, but the White House pulled the plug amid GOP pushback.

Some members of the Democratic caucus, meanwhile, are making the case for the very system Scott is warning his colleagues about.

“Let’s finally create a system that puts your health over corporate profits,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said earlier this week. “We need Medicare for All.”

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Alternet

How white supremacy prevented America from having single-payer healthcare

Thom Hartmann December 16, 2024

In the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, Americans are wondering out loud why we’re getting ripped off by giant insurance companies when every other developed country in the world has healthcare as a right and pays an average of about half of what we do — and gets better outcomes.

As I point out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, and brought up with Joy Reid on her program last week, America is:

— The only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right,

— The only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare and a half-million families facing bankruptcy every year because somebody got sick,

— The only country in the developed world where over 40% of the population carries $220 billion in medical debt,

— And the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, enslaved and then legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race.

These things, along with UnitedHealth’s $370 billion in revenue and $32 billion in profit, are connected.

Roughly 60 percent of Americans would have had to take out a loan or otherwise borrow or beg for money to deal with a single, unexpected $1,000 expense.

Yet annual family medical copays and out -of-pocket deductibles averaged $6,575 in 2023, when the Kaiser Family Foundation did a comprehensive survey of Americans. This strikes minorities particularly hard, which, it turns out, is not an accident.

The simple fact is that, were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism,” America would have had a national, single-payer healthcare system in 1915, just 31 years after Germany put into place the modern world’s first such program.

At the center of the effort to prevent a national healthcare system — or any form of government assistance that may even incidentally offer benefit to African Americans — were Frederick Ludwig Hoffman and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, which promoted his “science based” racial theories to successfully fight single-payer health insurance.

Racism is the main reason that America doesn’t consider healthcare a human right and provide it to all citizens, in contrast to every other developed country in the world. Racist whites, particularly in the South, have worked for over a century to make sure that healthcare is hard for Black people and other minorities to get.

And their biggest ally, their founding spokesperson in the post–Civil War era, their biggest champion right up to the 1940s, was a man that most Americans have never heard of.

In 1884, 19-year-old Frederick Ludwig Hoffmann left Germany for America after failing at a number of job attempts and being rejected for the German Army because he was “physically deficient” and frail, standing five-foot-seven and weighing a mere 110 pounds. He arrived in New York with $4.76 in his pocket, speaking “not a word of English” but determined to prove wrong his mother’s assessment that he was a “good-for-nothing.”

From this humble beginning, Hoffmann went on to become one of America’s most influential statisticians and analysts of public health, making numerous consequential discoveries about how industrialization was killing American workers.

He dropped the last n in his last name, became so fluent in English that his accent was nearly indistinguishable, and married into an upscale Georgia family. By 1920 he was an American citizen, vice president of America’s largest insurance company, and a national authority on the now-discredited pseudoscience called scientific racism.

In 1908, his article “The Mortality from Consumption [tuberculosis] in the Dusty Trades,” published by the US Department of Labor, produced the first national efforts to reduce lung damage in the workplace. He also published the first work (1915) linking tobacco to lung cancer.

From this, he became vice president of the National Tuberculosis Association (today known as the American Lung Association) and later demonstrated the connection between exposure to asbestos and the disease that killed my father, mesothelioma (a bit of data that asbestos companies worked to keep hidden for the next 80 years).

But Hoffman’s most controversial lifelong obsession was with the relationship between disease, race, and society.

On one of his first trips to Georgia, he wrote, he came across a book by Dr. Eugene R. Corson, a Georgia obstetrician, titled The Vital Equation of the Colored Race and Its Future in the United States. It was apparently an updated or shortened version of Corson’s widely read “The Future of the Colored Race in the United States From an Ethnic and Medical Standpoint,” published in 1887 in the New York Medical Times.

This was just after the failure of Reconstruction, and a widespread topic of speculation, particularly in the South, was whether Black people would soon outnumber white people in that part of the country.

The Ku Klux Klan and others calling for wholesale slaughter and suppression of Black people claimed that they were more likely to have larger families because they were “more prolific,” code for “excessively sexual,” a charge that had persisted from the earliest days of slavery and led to the murder of Emmett Till (among others).

However, the “scientific” racists of the day, like Corson, thought differently. Corson led a movement suggesting that people of African ancestry, now lacking “the protective womb of slavery,” would die out for the simple reason that the Black race was “inferior to whites.”

Corson promoted the Klan’s argument that “the simpler the organism, the simpler the genesis and the greater the prolificness.” But, he said, white people would prevail because they were less likely to die of disease, citing Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility.

While Black people might have more children, Corson wrote, white people would still outnumber them because Black fecundity “is more than compensated for by the ability [of white people] to maintain individual life.”

Enslaved people from Africa had found themselves in a civilization “of which [they are] not a product” and thus were less likely to be successful in “the struggle for existence.” Therefore, Corson wrote, Black people “must suffer physically, a result which forbids any undue increase in the race.”

The discovery of this theory, called the racial extinction thesis, electrified Hoffman, and he spent the rest of his life promoting it, while campaigning to stop any sort of movement toward a national health insurance program that might prevent or slow down the extinction of Black people in America.

In August 1896, the American Economic Association published a book that represented a turning point in Frederick Hoffman’s life and sealed the fate of single-payer health insurance in America. It was Hoffman’s magnum opus, summarizing decades of compiled statistics on Black versus white mortality, proving, according to Hoffman, once and for all, that for Black people, “gradual extinction is only a question of time.”

In Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, Hoffman set out not only to repeatedly make and statistically prove the above claim, but also to prove that anytime white people tried to help Black people, particularly by offering them healthcare services, the result was disaster for both.

Noting that “the Negro has failed to gain a foothold in any of the northern states,” Hoffman wrote, “he is in the South as a permanent factor . . . with a tendency to drift into the cities, there to concentrate in the most undesirable and unsanitary sections . . . and the evil effect will be more felt by the cities which are thus augmented in population of an undesirable character.”

In great detail, Hoffman spent about 300 pages documenting, with exhaustive tables and statistics, the fact that Black people were more likely to die as a result of everything from malaria to tuberculosis to childbirth.

And it was all because of their race, Hoffman argued:

“The decrease in the rate of increase of the colored population has been traced first to the excessive mortality, which in turn has been traced to an inferior vital capacity. . . . This racial inferiority has, in turn, brought about a moral deterioration . . . sexual immorality . . . diminished social and economic efficiency . . .”

And that represented a danger to white people, Hoffman wrote.

The participation of freed Black people in the contemporary labor pool and in society overall, he wrote, “in the course of years must prove not only a most destructive factor in the progress of the colored race, but also in the progress, social as well as economic, of the white race brought under its influence.”

Slavery had actually been good for Black people, Hoffman believed, and the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War was only going to speed up the demise of that race.

“Nothing is more clearly shown from this investigation,” he wrote, “than that the southern black man at the time of emancipation was healthy in body and cheerful in mind. He neither suffered inordinately from disease nor from impaired bodily vigor.”

But with abolition, formerly enslaved people were “tending toward a condition in which matters will be worse than they are now, when diseases will be more destructive, vital resistance still lower, when the number of births will fall below the deaths, and gradual extinction of the race will take place.”

While Hoffman pioneered linking causal conditions such as asbestos and carcinogen exposure to sickness, he was so blinded by racism that a modern reader of his book constantly finds himself shouting, “But these things are also true of poor whites! These are caused by discrimination and poverty!!”

At the time, though, the vast majority of white Americans agreed with him. He was echoing the white cultural and scientific consensus of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when he wrote:

“Given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities which are determining factors in the struggle for race supremacy. The lower races, even under the same conditions of life, must necessarily fail because the vast number of incapables, which a hard struggle for life has eliminated from the ranks of the white races, are still forming the large body of the lower races.”

And, according to Hoffman and the other white “scientific racists,” the problem wasn’t just physical inferiority. The deepest “problem of the Negro,” Hoffman wrote, was moral:

“All the facts prove that a low standard of sexual morality is the main and underlying cause of the low and anti-social condition of the race at the present time. . . . The conclusion is warranted that it is merely a question of time when the actual downward course, that is, a decrease in the population will take place. In the meantime, however, the presence of the colored population is a serious hindrance to the economic progress of the white race.”

For those well-intentioned white people who wanted to help out the people who were a mere generation or two away from slavery, Hoffman and his colleagues had one simple bit of advice: Don’t even try.

In 1980, David Koch famously ran for vice president of the United States under the banner of the Libertarian Party, an organization founded a few decades earlier by big business to give an economic rationale and political patina to their simple theory that economics were more important than democracy, and the quality of life of working people should be decided in the “free marketplace” instead of by unions or through democratic processes via government regulation.

In this, Koch and his Libertarian friends were echoing Frederick Hoffman.

In his 1896 book Race Traits, Hoffman laid out his “scientific” assertion that when government steps in to help people, it invariably ends up hurting them instead. Not only should there be no government assistance given to help African Americans recover from three centuries of property theft, forced labor, and legal violence, but it is scientifically wrong to even consider the idea.

White people and government programs to better the lives of Black people, Hoffman wrote, deserve “the most severe condemnation of modern attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their own elevated position.”

The damage done to Black people by offering them any sort of help, government assistance, or even a minimum wage, he wrote, is “criminal” behavior for a “civilized people.”

Hoffman pointed to Native Americans to prove his point:

“Few races have made such a brave struggle for their own preservation; few races can boast of so high a degree of aboriginal civilization. . . . An iron will can be traced upon the countenance of nearly every Indian of note.”

But it was government help, Hoffman wrote, that destroyed the American Indian.

It wasn’t “adulterated whiskey nor the frightful consequences of sexual immorality, spread around the forts and settlements of the whites,” that was “sufficient” to destroy Native Americans. It was charity.

“The most subtle agency of all,” he wrote, sounding like Ronald Reagan or David Koch, “governmental pauperism, the highest development of the theory of easy conditions of life, did what neither drink nor the poisons of venereal disease could do, and today the large majority of the tribes are following the Maories and Hawaiians towards the goal of final extinction.”

White Americans rationalized their brutality toward Native Americans and African Americans by saying that it was simple evolutionary biology: only the strong survive, and when the weak are allowed to propagate, it weakens the overall human race.

“Easy conditions of life and a liberal charity are among the most destructive influences affecting the lower races,” Hoffman concluded, “since by such methods the weak and incapable are permitted to increase and multiply, while the struggle of the more able is increased in severity [by the increase in taxes and regulation].”

And it’s not just charity.

“All the facts prove,” Hoffman wrote, “that education, philanthropy, and religion have failed to develop [among Black people] a higher appreciation of the stern and uncompromising virtues of the Aryan race.

“Instead of making the race more independent, modern educational and philanthropic efforts have succeeded in making it even more dependent on the white race at the present time than it was previous to emancipation.”

Free education — as any Libertarian can tell you — is more dangerous to the souls of people than slavery. And free healthcare is even worse.

Sounding like a modern-day acolyte of Ayn Rand, Hoffman wrote:

“Instead of clamoring for aid and assistance from the white race, the negro himself should sternly refuse every offer of direct interference in his own evolution. The more difficult his upward struggle, the more enduring will be the qualities developed.”

And, like Ayn Rand, David Koch, and Ronald Reagan, Hoffman believed that these were eternal truths independent of race:

“No missionary or educator or philanthropist extended aid or comfort to the English peasant class during its darkest days, to the earliest settlers on the coast of New England, or the pioneer in the forests of the far West. . . . [I]t is extremely rare to find a case where easy conditions of life or liberal charity have assisted man in his upward struggle. Self reliance . . . must be developed, and thus far have not been developed by the aid of charity or liberal philanthropy.”

This libertarian ideal is still pervasive in our modern fragmented healthcare system, and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 it resulted in thousands of daily American deaths, disproportionately hitting racial minorities.

The “compulsory health insurance” (what today we’d call Medicare for All) movement of the early 20th century was as much (and possibly more) about getting paid sick leave as it was about covering doctor visits and hospitalization, because healthcare was so cheap that an unpaid week at work was a bigger hit to the wallet.

But workers wanted both.

The most successful effort of the era came out of an organization that a small group of progressive economists put together in 1905 and 1906, known as the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL).

Their initial efforts were directed at paid sick leave, workers’ compensation insurance, child labor laws, and workplace safety standards. To that last end, they were actively using the kinds of statistical analysis that Frederick Hoffman had both used and popularized to do everything from laying out his theories on race to showing an association between tobacco use and lung cancer.

Hoffman joined the AALL to promote their efforts…at least that was his claim.

A charitable reading of his motivations was that his statistical research on workplace phosphorus poisoning and lung disease overlapped with their efforts, and they were an organization that, at that time, was held in high regard. He did, after all, consider himself — and was, in a very real way — a major force for reform in public health and workplace safety arenas.

A less charitable motivation is posited in Daniel T. Rodgers’s 1998 book Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Rodgers wrote:

“On the AALL social insurance committee, he became the [Prudential] company’s mole. . . . Hoffman took credit for blocking the drafting of any resolutions at the AALL’s social insurance conference in 1913. During the framing of the association’s model health insurance bill, he dragged his feet, obstructed, pressed in vain for company initiatives in the medical insurance field, and informed his employers — more and more certain that public health insurance was ‘distinctly pernicious and a menace to our interests.’”

Despite Prudential and Hoffman’s efforts, government-funded health insurance was gaining popularity in America (and being adopted across Europe).

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt made a third-party bid for the presidency, forming the Progressive Party (with its Bull Moose logo), and called for “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance.”

Jane Addams (Hull House founder), dressed in suffragette white, seconded Roosevelt’s nomination to wild cheers and applause; Roosevelt rallies routinely drew tens of thousands of people, and more than 200,000 people showed up in Los Angeles to support him and the party.

Roosevelt’s endorsement of “social insurance,” including health coverage, both reflected and reinforced a growing national sentiment, and in 1915 the AALL called for every state to support a program of health insurance. Prudential hadn’t yet gotten into the business of insuring health (they would in 1925), but they could see the writing on the wall.

In 1916, the AALL endorsed health insurance provided through a network of local and statewide mutual companies and called for those policies to also provide a small death benefit to cover funeral costs, which would have competed directly with the funeral coverage that was Prudential’s main cash cow.

Hoffman wrote to the company, “We, of course, cannot compete with Compulsory Insurance, including a death benefit of, say $100.” He then resigned “in disgust” from the AALL and begin a campaign, sponsored by Prudential, to stop state-funded health insurance.

Hoffman and Prudential weren’t alone in their concern: the Insurance Federation of New York told their members:

“This is only the entering wedge; if once a foothold is obtained it will mean attempts to have such State Insurance of all kinds...”

The AALL produced model legislation that was taken up in 1916 by eight states, including California and New York, the former via a ballot initiative and the latter in the New York legislature. In addition to calling for policies that would pay all costs of healthcare, the AALL’s legislation called for up to 26 weeks of paid sick leave.

Picking up steam, the American Medical Association endorsed the AALL’s model legislation as well. The battle was joined.

Hoffman’s Prudential-sponsored campaign to prevent any state from adopting a statewide nonprofit health (and death benefit) insurance program went into overdrive through 1916–1920. He traveled to Germany several times to chronicle, in minute detail, the failings of the kaiser’s system that had been operating since 1885.

Prudential, in 1905, had been swept up in New York’s Armstrong Investigation, and so, as historian Beatrix Hoffman (no relation to Frederick) wrote, “[b]ecause of their industry’s public image problems, insurance executives knew their opposition to compulsory health insurance would be perceived as brazen self-interest.”

They needed a front man, and the guy who was famous for discovering the causes of numerous public health crises was perfect. Thus, Frederick Hoffman became the most well-known face of a massive, multiyear effort to stop the AALL’s campaign. He was remarkably effective.

In the years between 1916, when he resigned from AALL, and 1920, when nonprofit state-funded health insurance finally died, Hoffman wrote numerous pamphlets trashing the German single-payer government health system, “exposing” corruption in the British efforts at a National Health Service, and arguing that America’s healthcare system would be thrown into chaos and crisis if the AALL’s programs were adopted.

His work was widely distributed, as historian Daniel Rodgers noted: “The Prudential saturated the state capitols with his pamphlets.”

His 1917 pamphlet Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, and the subsequent More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, published two years later, were his most widely cited and most consequential writings.

Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote that the Facts pamphlet “resembled Race Traits and Tendencies in its impressive presentation of statistics and graphs alongside passionate polemics.” Frederick Hoffman refuted every figure the Progressives used in defense of their plan, from “Misleading Data on German Longevity” to “Misleading Estimate of Cost” and “Disregard of Actuarial Methods.”

Appealing to the Daniel Boone mythos of rugged, independent individualism that didn’t require assistance from government, Frederick Hoffman wrote in More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance:

“The ever-present menace to democracy and liberty is the perversion of the legislative function [toward providing health insurance].”

Hoffman’s writing and speeches shook America’s political systems, particularly as this German-born “man of science” warned of the dire consequences to American liberty and democracy represented by universal health insurance.

In 1918, John R. Commons — one of the AALL’s cofounders — wrote that almost all the nation’s anti–compulsory health insurance propaganda “originates from one source; all of the ammunition, all of the facts and statistics that may come across, no matter who gives them to you, will be found to go back to the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, and to Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman.”

Prudential paid to transport Hoffman all across America, from media events to congressional hearings to a trip to England to document the horrors of their National Health Service system, which had gone into effect in 1911.

He wrote from London, in a widely read paper, that because of the British National Insurance Act, “The fine spirit of the English working classes, at one time the finest people of that type in the world, is gone, entirely gone.”

Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote:

“His agitation was tireless, his influence widespread. . . . His reputation as an expert allowed Hoffman to participate in the deliberations of the health insurance commissions of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Connecticut, and to successfully persuade commission members to vote against the plan.”

In 1920, in large part because of Prudential’s efforts and Hoffman’s warnings, California’s voters resoundingly turned down a voter initiative in that state to provide health insurance, and, although New York’s Senate passed the bill, it died in committee in the Assembly.

While the AALL continued to campaign for state-funded health insurance until their dissolution in 1946, they never again gained enough traction to get their proposal before any state legislatures or the US Congress.

Having succeeded in killing state-funded health insurance, Hoffman, in the later 1920s, turned his attention back to his theory that Black people would eventually die out, joining the Eugenics Research Association (whose work was later used by Hitler to justify racial separation and his “final solution”).

In 1929, Hoffman asserted, in the African American publication Opportunity, that “the white race is almost solely responsible . . . for the health progress which the South has made during the last generation” and that Black people moving in large numbers into cities would “lead to a thoroughly unwholesome state of affairs which unquestionably will express itself in course of time in a lower birth rate and a higher death rate.”

Hoffman’s influence lasted long past his death in 1946 (which satisfied his stated desire to live long enough to see FDR out of office). As late as 1984, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, Prudential was still collecting premiums from African Americans that were “in some instances more than a third higher” than those paid by whites.

We even see an echo of it in the opposition of southern white racist Senators to Medicare in 1965, arguably leading to the 20% hole in that system that requires MediGap policies to fill.

Were it not for “scientific racism,” America would have long ago joined the rest of the developed world with a competent and efficient national healthcare system. Instead, we’re stuck with for-profit health insurance giants sucking our blood like giant leeches attached to our backs.

NOW READ: Inside the DOGE billionaires' plan to kill Medicare

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When profits kill: The deadly cost of treating healthcare as a business

Thom Hartmann December 10, 2024

The recent assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare — the health insurance company with, reportedly, the highest rate of claims rejections (and thus dead, wounded, and furious customers and their relations) — gives us a perfect window to understand the stupidity and danger of the Musk/Trump/Ramaswamy strategy of “cutting government” to “make it more efficient, run it like a corporation.”

Consider health care, which in almost every other developed country in the world is legally part of the commons — the infrastructure of the nation, like our roads, public schools, parks, police, military, libraries, and fire departments — owned by the people collectively and run for the sole purpose of meeting a basic human need.

The entire idea of government — dating all the way back to Gilgamesh and before — is to fulfill that singular purpose of meeting citizens’ needs and keeping the nation strong and healthy. That’s a very different mandate from that of a corporation, which is solely directed (some argue by law) to generate profits.

The Veterans’ Administration healthcare system, for example, is essentially socialist rather than capitalist. The VA owns the land and buildings, pays the salaries of everybody from the surgeons to the janitors, and makes most all decisions about care. Its primary purpose — just like that of the healthcare systems of every other democracy in the world — is to keep and make veterans healthy. Its operation is nearly identical to that of Britain’s beloved socialist National Health Service.

UnitedHealthcare similarly owns its own land and buildings, and its officers and employees behave in a way that’s aligned with the company’s primary purpose, but that purpose is to make a profit. Sure, it writes checks for healthcare that’s then delivered to people, but that’s just the way UnitedHealthcare makes money; writing checks and, most importantly, refusing to write checks.

Think about it. If UnitedHealthcare’s main goal was to keep people healthy, they wouldn’t be rejecting 32 percent of claims presented to them. Like the VA, when people needed help they’d make sure they got it.

Instead, they make damn sure their executives get millions of dollars every year (and investors get billions) because making a massive profit ($23 billion last year, and nearly every penny arguably came from saying “no” to somebody’s healthcare needs) is their real business.

On the other hand, if the VA’s goal was to make or save money by “being run efficiently like a company,” they’d be refusing service to a lot more veterans (which it appears is on the horizon).

This is the essential difference between government and business, between meeting human needs (social) and reaching capitalism’s goal (profit).

It’s why its deeply idiotic to say, as Republicans have been doing since the Reagan Revolution, that “government should be run like a business.” That’s nearly as crackbrained a suggestion as saying that fire departments should make a profit (a doltish notion promoted by some Libertarians). Government should be run like a government, and companies should be run like companies.

Given how obvious this is with even a little bit of thought, where did this imbecilic idea that government should run like a business come from?

Turns out, it’s been driven for most of the past century by morbidly rich businessmen (almost entirely men) who don’t want to pay their taxes. As Jeff Tiedrich notes:

“The scariest sentence in the English language is: ‘I’m a billionaire, and I’m here to help.’”

Rightwing billionaires who don’t want to pay their fair share of the costs of society set up think tanks, policy centers, and built media operations to promote their idea that the commons are really there for them to plunder under the rubric of privatization and efficiency.

They’ve had considerable success. Slightly more than half of Medicare is now privatized, multiple Republican-controlled states are in the process of privatizing their public school systems, and the billionaire-funded Project 2025 and the incoming Trump administration have big plans for privatizing other essential government services.

The area where their success is most visible, though, is the American healthcare system. Because the desire of rightwing billionaires not to pay taxes have prevailed ever since Harry Truman first proposed single-payer healthcare like most of the rest of the world has, Americans spend significantly more on healthcare than other developed countries.

In 2022, citizens of the United States spent an estimated $12,742 per person on healthcare, the highest among wealthy nations. This is nearly twice the average of $6,850 per person for other wealthy OECD countries.

Over the next decade, it is estimated that America will spend between $55 and $60 trillion on healthcare if nothing changes and we continue to cut giant corporations in for a large slice of our healthcare money.

On the other hand, Senator Bernie Sanders’ single-payer Medicare For All plan would only cost $32 trillion over the next 10 years. And it would cover everybody in America, every man woman and child, in every medical aspect including vision, dental, psychological, and hearing.

Currently 25 million Americans have no health insurance whatsoever.

If we keep our current system, the difference between it and the savings from a single-payer system will end up in the pockets, in large part, of massive insurance giants and their executives and investors. And as campaign contributions for bought off Republicans. This isn’t rocket science.

And you’d think that giving all those extra billions to companies like UnitedHealthcare would result in America having great health outcomes. But, no.

Despite insanely higher spending, the U.S. has a lower life expectancy at birth, higher rates of chronic diseases, higher rates of avoidable or treatable deaths, and higher maternal and infant mortality rates than any of our peer nations.

Compared to single-payer nations like Canada, the U.S. also has a higher incidence of chronic health conditions, Americans see doctors less often and have fewer hospital stays, and the U.S. has fewer hospital beds and physicians per person.

No other country in the world allows a predatory for-profit industry like this to exist as a primary way of providing healthcare. Every other advanced democracy considers healthcare a right of citizenship, rather than an opportunity for a handful of industry executives to hoard a fortune, buy Swiss chalets, and fly around on private jets.

This is one of the most widely shared graphics on social media over the past few days in posts having to do with Thompson’s murder…

Sure, there are lots of health insurance companies in other developed countries, but instead of offering basic healthcare (which is provided by the government) mostly wealthy people subscribe to them to pay for premium services like private hospital rooms, international air ambulance services, and cosmetic surgery.

Essentially, UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson made decisions that killed Americans for a living, in exchange for $10 million a year. He and his peers in the industry are probably paid as much as they are because there is an actual shortage of people with business training who are willing to oversee decisions that cause or allow others to die in exchange for millions in annual compensation.

That Americans are well aware of this obscenity explains the gleeful response to his murder that’s spread across social media, including the refusal of online sleuths to participate in finding his killer.

It shouldn’t need be said that vigilantism is no way to respond to toxic individuals and companies that cause Americans to die unnecessarily. Hopefully, Thompson’s murder will spark a conversation about the role of government and the commons — and the very real need to end the corrupt privatization of our healthcare system (including the Medicare Advantage scam) that has harmed so many of us and killed or injured so many of the people we love.

ALSO READ: CEO shooting suspect’s manifesto claims violence is answer to health care industry: report

===

Right-Wing "Think" Tanks and Health Policy

right-Wing "Think" Tanks and Health Policy

“You can always tell if you’re succeeding by the viciousness of the opposition.”

— Dr. Quentin Young, PNHP National Coordinator

By Nicholas Skala. Updated by Chris Gray, July, 2010

As the movement for single payer expands, attacks on single payer in the media by the far right have increased. In addition to misleading articles and op-eds, several books attacking single payer by conservative pundits were published in recent years, including one endorsed by former GOP Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

The PNHP National Office has identified 20 right-wing think tanks that employ full-time health policy “scholars” to oppose national health insurance and advocate for health care privatization, deregulation and market-based reforms. These groups are funded with millions of dollars from wealthy far-right foundations such as the Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, the John Olin Foundation, the Adolph Coors family’s Castle Rock Foundation and the Scaife Family Foundations, which share an ultra-conservative social agenda.

The Right-Wing “Echo Chamber”: Although they masquerade as legitimate research institutions, most of these policy think tanks are little more than PR firms for those who want to obscure the facts about health care in America. Many, such as the Fraser Institute, produce bogus research and purposely avoid peer review. Instead, they provide “experts” with fancy titles to write editorials and appear on TV news programs to spread misinformation. Each of these institutions is funded by the same small group of ideological foundations, and it is extremely common for these “experts” to cite each other’s bogus research in their commentaries, giving the impression of wide scientific credibility for their views. Twenty of the top “think” tanks are detailed below. Members are encouraged to take the lead on behalf of PNHP in responding to misinformation spread by these and other groups.

1. American Enterprise Institute

_Advocates:_ Privatization, Medicaid cuts, tax credits for the uninsured, teaching emotionally disturbed children to seek “self-reliance” rather than going to therapy.

_Look Out For:_ “Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care” Joseph Antos, “Resident Scholar” John E. Calfee, “Senior Fellow” Newt Gingrich. Mark McClellan, M.D. “Resident Fellow” Thomas P. Miller

_2008 Budget_: $50.9 million

2. Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

_Advocates:_ This tiny group’s impressive name often confers false legitimacy onto its public statements. AAPS favors abolishing Medicare and is primarily devoted to spreading misinformation about single payer. Opposes HIPAA as government interference. Has made claims that HIV does not cause AIDS and a “gay male lifestyle” shortens life expectancy by 20 years. Also attempted to link abortions with breast cancer. Journal has claimed undocumented immigrants are carriers of disease such as leprosy.

_Look Out For_: Executive Director Jane Orient, M.D., “Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons”

_2009 Budget_: $1.1 million

3. Cato Institute

_Advocates_: Medicaid / Medicare privatization, FDA deregulation, HSAs, elimination of state mandatory coverage laws for insurance companies, increased managed care. “Health status insurance” – insurance to have money to afford high-risk health insurance. Phase out employer-sponsored health care in favor of individual market. Advocates purchasing insurance across state lines, from states with little regulation.

_Look Out For_: “Director of Health Policy Studies” Michael F. Cannon; “Director of Health & Welfare Studies” Mike Tanner.

_2008 Budget_: $20.1 million

4. Competitive Enterprise Institute

_Advocates_: Operates the “Death by Regulation” Project, which seeks to reduce or eliminate FDA regulations which “delay the availability of life-saving treatments.”

_Look Out For_: General Counsel Sam Kazman; “Senior Fellow” Gregory Conko; TV reporter John Stossel

_2007 Budget_: $5.3 million

5. Discovery Institute

_Advocates_: Main health policy business seems to be publicizing Fraser Institute (see number 6) research in editorials, but also notable for providing “experts” to criticize the scientific basis of Evolutionary Theory at meetings of Kansas’ public school board.

_Look Out For:_ “Senior Fellows” Robert J. Cihak and Richard W. Rahn (also of Cato Inst.). Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity.

_2008 Budget:_ $5.2 million

6. Fraser Institute

_Advocates:_ Specializes in producing unreviewed crackpot studies such as “How Good is Canadian Health Care?” and the annual “Waiting List Survey.”

_Look Out For_: Anything even remotely tied to Fraser. Their research is so bad that not even pro-privatization Canadians bother to cite their work.

_2008 Budget_: $13.7 million

7. Galen Institute

_Advocates_: Privatization, tax credits for the uninsured, health savings accounts, health reimbursement arrangements, “competition in the health sector” and “incentive-driven health reform,” bills itself as “only free-market think tank solely dedicated to…putting individuals rather than corporate or government bureaucrats in charge of health care decisions.”

_Look Out For_: President Grace-Marie Turner; “Center for Consumer Driven Health Care” Director Greg Scandlen., Sewell Hinton Dixon, M.D.

_2008 Budget_: $814,000

8. Heartland Institute

_Advocates_: Privatization, health savings accounts, state-subsidized high-risk insurance pools, voluntary drug industry discounts for the uninsured, “consumer-driven health care,” deregulation of health insurance.

_Look Out For_: “Senior Fellow” Merrill Matthews Jr., “Fellow” Scott Whipple.

_2008 Budget_: $7.8 million

9. The Heritage Foundation

_Advocates_: Medicaid / Medicare privatization, tax credits for the uninsured, health savings accounts (HSAs), drug “discount” cards.

_Look Out For_: “Center for Health Policy Studies Director” Robert Moffit; “Vice President for Domestic Policy” Stuart M. Butler.

_2008 Budget_: $70.9 million

10. Hudson Institute

Advocates: Medical malpractice award caps, elimination of state mandatory-coverage laws, policy papers make numerous hostile references to abortion. Attacked WHO for allowing distribution of generic anti-retroviral drugs.

_Look Out For_: “Senior Fellows” Ronald W. Dworkin and Betsy McCaughey.

_2007 Budget_: $11.1 million

11. Institute for Health Freedom

_Advocates_: Essentially the total abolishment of Medicare and Medicaid, “consumer driven health care” and HSAs.

_Look Out For_: President Sue A. Blevins

_2008 Budget_: $236,000

12. Manhattan Institute

_Advocates_: HSAs and “consumer driven reform,” eliminating premium tax deductibility for employers, remedying the fact that “Americans tend to be over-insured.” Manufactures misinformation about Canada’s health system to undermine support for national health insurance in America.

_Look Out For_: “Senior Fellow” David Gratzer, M.D., Center for Medical Progress, Chairman Paul Singer

_2008 Budget_: $9.7 million

13. National Center for Policy Analysis

_Advocates_: Privatization and health savings accounts (NCPA runs the “consumer-driven health care project”), health debit cards, increased cost-shifting to patients.

_Look Out For_: President and CEO John C. Goodman, Ph.D.

_2007 Budget_: $4.1 million

14. Pacific Research Institute

_Advocates_: HSAs, tax credits, banning prescription re-importation (PRI extensively uses crackpot data supplied from fellow Bradley beneficiary the Fraser Institute).

_Look Out For_: Pacific CEO Sally C. Pipes; “Director of Health Care Studies” John R. Graham

_2008 Budget_: $4.0 million

15. Hoover Institution

_Advocates_: Recirculates material from National Center for Policy Analysis: uncited statistics praising the U.S. system and disparaging other health systems. Supports medical savings accounts, abolishing Medicare, Medicaid and elimination of employer-sponsored health care.

_Look Out For_: Michael W. McConnell, senior fellow

_2008 Budget_: Part of Stanford University; no data available.

16. American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC )

_Advocates_: Seeks to oppose single-payer laws at the state level by pushing forward constitutional amendments to ensure private health insurance; also opposes universal health care in general, against the individual mandates. Spinoff of the Heritage Foundation that works in state governments.

_Look Out For_: Christine Herrera, health and human services director

_2008 Budget_: $7.0 million

17. Americans for Prosperity and the American for Prosperity Foundation

_Advocates_: Ran series of commericals of Canadian woman who claimed to be denied surgery for brain tumor when she never had more than a benign cyst. Attacked single payer and Canada’s system in the debate, pre-emptively excluding single-payer from the reforms.

_Look Out For_: Patients United Now (bogus shell group), Any Menefee.

_2008 Budget_: $14.4 million

18. Independence Institute

_Advocates_: Colorado “libertarian” group, behind anti-single-payer group “Patient Power Now” and “Center for the American Dream,” former board members include right-wing Republicans former Interior Secretary Gale Norton and overtly racist Rep. Tom Tancredo.

_Look Out For_: Linda Gorman, health policy researcher

_2008 Budget_: $1.8 million

19. National Center for Public Policy Research

_Advocates_: Puts out bogus information about allowing the government to negotiate drug policies for Medicare. Pushes for privatization of Medicare. Warns against single-payer “propaganda” and Sweden’s system.

_Look Out For_: Edmund F. Haislmaier, health care analyst. Amy and David Ridenour, health care “experts.”

_2008 Budget_: $8.6 million

20. FreedomWorks Foundation + Freedom Works, Inc.

_Advocates_: Founded by Charles Koch. Attacks Obama health plan as a government takeover of health care. Boasts of work to derail single-payer systems and “Hillary Care” in the past. Group is a fake grassroots organization, Wall Street-supported front group that helped set off the Tea Party movement. Social Security privatization, outreach for pharmaceutical donors. Attacks FDA to speed up drug approvals.

_Look Out For_: Dick Armey, Wayne T. Brough, Ph.D. Group is formerly known as Citizens for a Sound Economy.

_2008 Budget_: $7.4 million

---

ggl

[### A FRAMEWORK FOR HEALTHCARE REFORM

healthcareforyou.com

https://www.healthcareforyou.com › policy-guide](https://www.healthcareforyou.com/policy-guide/)

The Job Creators Network Foundation and Physicians for Reform have conducted the largest market research healthcare study involving more than 30,000 ...Read more

---

an 12 24

According to **The World Happiness Report, the United States fell to #23 in terms of happiness earlier this year — way behind Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland and other countries in Europe.

William S. Becker, a former U.S. Energy Department official who now serves as executive director for the Presidential Climate Action Project, lays out a variety of reasons for the United States' declining mental health in a biting op-ed published by The Hill on December 9.

Citing health care, education, inequality and other problems, Becker argues that the United States is failing its people miserably.

READ MORE:[Why Measles, Whooping Cough and worse could roar back under RFK's watch

"The U.S. is the among the wealthiest countries in the world per capita," Becker explains, "but the American people are not happy. The Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, but the founding documents do say we all have an equal right to pursue it."

Becker points to data from the World Happiness Report, noting that "Nordic nations dominate the top 10 list" in terms of happiness.

"The happiest countries have capitalist economies and democratic governments," Becker argues, "but they provide their people with essential tools for success — tools that American conservatives brand as 'socialist.' Universal health care is one. The United States is the only high-income nation without it."

Becker continues, "Americans pay nearly four times as much for prescription drugs and higher costs for hospitalization and doctors than people in other developed countries. More than 27 million Americans still have no health insurance."

READ MORE:[Kansas Republican slams Louis DeJoy's USPS performance — to his face

The United States' health insurance crisis, Becker warns, will become even worse if the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, is overturned during President-elect Donald Trump's second term.

"As of March," Becker observes, "over 45 million Americans were enrolled in Obamacare. Trump tried to kill that option during his first term and says he has 'concepts' to replace it now. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 3.4 million Americans would lose health insurance without Obamacare."

Access to "quality education," according to Becker, also plays a major role in a country's mental wellbeing — and the U.S., he says, falls way beyond Scandinavian countries in that area.

Inequality, Becker adds, is also harming Americans' mental health.

Becker observes, "Income and wealth are more equitably distributed in happy countries such as Iceland, Denmark and Norway.… In 2017, Trump's tax cuts widened the wealth gap by skewing tax policy toward the rich…. Trump has promised to lower corporate taxes even more next year…. Meanwhile, America's middle class is shrinking while its lower class expands. Nearly 38 million Americans live in poverty.

READ MORE:['America will not be made great again': McConnell received ovation after 'swipe' at Trump

*William S. Becker's full op-ed for The Hill is available at this link.

===

2/17

see medicare for all for newer

8 23

https://www.alternet.org/medical-debt-2663079787/

not credit report

aha note how anti-commie gubmint BS been used to thwart death panel  ark pjt crooked hillary:

https://truthout.org/articles/unequal-protection-the-deciding-moment/

https://www.youtube.com/ 404

https://truthout.org/articles/unequal-influence-there-are-politicians-who-work-on-behalf-of-corporations-and-those-who-work-on-behalf-of-humans/

...How Public Opinion Is Influenced by Concentrated Money

Poll after poll has shown that Americans overwhelmingly support reform of our health-care system. People are concerned about costs and quality of care. Yet in 1993, when President Bill Clinton proposed that the government offer some form of health-care protection to the nation’s 40-plus-million uninsured, the insurance industry spent an estimated $100 million on lobbying and $60 million on advertising and provided members of Congress with about 350 free trips.

What actually happened as a result of all this spending is extraordinarily ironic. Industry polls showed that people cared more about being able to choose their own doctor than most other medical issues. Taking advantage of this, an infamous series of ads featuring “Harry and Louise” warned Americans that under a government-run health insurance program they would lose their ability to select the doctor of their choice.

The advertising worked. People panicked, and American public opinion swung from strong support for Clinton’s proposals to overwhelming fear of them. The Internet became flooded with insulting e-mails about the evils of “Hillary’s” insurance proposal.

Even more ironically, those fears have been realized today—without the Clinton proposal. Back in 1993 you could pretty much go to any doctor you wanted (assuming you were insured), and your insurance would almost always pay for it. Overtly restricting that ability was never part of the Clinton proposal, but because of the power of the Harry and Louise ads people came to believe that it was.

And within a few years, insurance companies and HMOs (health maintenance organizations) began to crack down on consumers who wanted to select their own doctors. Today fewer Americans have that privilege than in 1993, even though it’s fully available to citizens of virtually every country that has a national health-care program…which is every developed country in the world except the United States.

It turns out there is a strong reason why the insurance industry was eager to invest so much cash in advertising and lobbying to keep the government from competing with it in the realm of health care: profits. For every $100 that passes through the hands of the government-administered Medicare programs, between $2 and $3 is spent by Medicare on administration, leaving $97 to $98 to pay for medical services and drugs. But of every $100 that flows through corporate insurance programs and HMOs, $10 to $45 sticks to corporate fingers along the way. As Yale University Professor of Public Policy Theodore R. Marmor, author of The Politics of Medicare, said, “The costs of administering private insurance are somewhere between 5 and 10 times the costs of administering Medicare.”5

After all, Medicare doesn’t have lavish corporate headquarters and corporate jets, nor does it pay expensive lobbying firms in Washington to work on its behalf. It doesn’t pay out profits in the form of dividends to its shareholders. And it doesn’t compensate its top executives with more than $1 million a year, as does each of the largest of the American insurance companies. The result, as Professor Marmor points out, is that Canadians—who receive health care at one-half the cost of comparable services in the United States because no insurance companies are in the middle—“are somewhat healthier than citizens of the United States, use more hospital days per thousand, and visit their physicians more often” because services are freely available.6

Yet most citizens of the United States have no idea what it’s like to live in a country with national health care. When our family lived in Germany for a year in the late 1980s, we were amazed at how smoothly its health-care system worked: we could make any appointment with any physician, and they were excellent at what they did. But even describing the reality of that experience draws uncomprehending stares from Americans, who have been fed a steady corporate diet of very one-sided information.

This is why when President Obama decided he wanted one of the main legacies of his presidency to be a solution to America’s health-care mess, he first met privately and secretly with the pharmaceutical, hospital, and health insurance industries. He cut a deal with them, if news reports are to be believed (and they were not denied by the Obama administration), that he would protect their interests and give them tens of millions of new customers if they would hold back and not spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy his attempts the way they had with Clinton.

Something really rotten has taken hold of the American political system when the president of the United States must go to big corporations on bended knee and get their approval before suggesting legislation.

Polluters Pass “Go”

...

===

1/22 slapped down ash kalra singlepayer?

covid --> disaster socialism?!

==

an 1020

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/expert-uber-funded-ballot-measure-in-california-would-create-permanent-underclass-of-workers/

no lnx (bad code?)

Expert: Uber-funded ballot measure in California would create 'permanent underclass of workers'

Angry young man driver, pissed off shaking hands and shrugging shoulders, has problems with the car. Displeased perplexed guy has a road accident. Traffic jam rush hour.

Nicole Karlis October 03, 2020

Those who took high school civics may recall that our democracies lives on fractions. A majority vote — one-half plus one — is what it takes to pass a bill in most legislative bodies. The constitution requires a "supermajority," meaning two-thirds of a governing body, for only the most important and crucial matters: to override a presidential veto, or remove an officer via impeachment, say.

If two-thirds seems like a high threshold for a congressional body, what about seven-eighths? That's the super-duper-majority that would be required to overturn Proposition 22 — the Uber- and Lyft-funded ballot measure that will appear on California ballots this November — should it pass this fall.

You read that right: the astroturf ballot measure written by some of Silicon Valley's biggest corporations, which is written to keep these companies' contractors from achieving benefits or a stable, salaried job, would require a seven-eighths majority of state legislators in both state chambers in order to be overturned — such a difficult threshold to meet that experts say it would be effectively permanent.

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The origin of Proposition 22

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It all goes back to California's Assembly Bill 5, which went into effect on January 1, 2020. The impetus for AB5 was to make gig economy work into more stable and reliable work, and reduce worker exploitation; currently, driver-contractors like those who work for Uber or Lyft are not guaranteed health care of any other benefits if they work more than 40 hours a week, as they are legally contractors rather than employees.

Likewise, such drivers and deliverypersons often make less than minimum wage after their own expenses are accounted for. AB5, which put into place a "test" to determine whether someone is a contractor or employee, was designed to lift these kinds of workers out of poverty.

Yet since AB5 passed through California's state legislature, Uber and Lyft have refused to comply; instead, they chose to pour over $180 million into the astroturf campaign for Proposition 22. Similar gig worker-reliant companies have chipped into the campaign, too. DoorDash has donated $47.5 million; Instacart has donated $27.5 million, and Postmates has contributed a little over $10 million.

According to Ballotpedia, Proposition 22 is the most expensive ballot measure contest in California, and the United States — and if it passes, it will set an example for the corporations that funded it that they could use as a model in other states. Indeed, the companies are funneling so much money into this campaign because there's a lot at stake. For example,Los Angeles and San Francisco are two of the five largest markets for Uber, which has stated in financial disclosures that new regulations in major metro areas could negatively affect their financials. Many of their workers have criticized these companies for pouring so much money into a campaign as they struggle to receive basic support, like personal protective equipment and hand sanitizer, from their employers during the pandemic.

Proposition 22 is more than just a determination of classification, though. Labor experts fear it will be a major setback for labor rights, the community at large, and that it will send the wrong signal to other states who have been exploring ways to regulate these companies.

"They have basically operated as though the law does not apply to them," Ken Jacobs, the chair of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, told Salon. "And I think that signals to other states around the country, 'Don't try to enforce your laws because we have the political power and resources to defeat you if you do.'"

We spoke to experts about the fine print of Proposition 22, and how it will affect Uber and Lyft drivers in the state of California if passed.

1. Very few drivers will actually qualify for health insurance benefits

Uber and Lyft have positioned Proposition 22 as a "third way" solution to provide more benefits to drivers. The campaign states on its website that voting "yes" on Proposition 22 will provide drivers with "new benefits and protections in these tough economic times including a minimum earnings guarantee,access to health carebenefits and insurance against illnesses and injuries acquired on the job."

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}:

Yet this depends on a driver's "engaged time," according to the proposition, meaning the time between accepting a ride and completing the ride. This doesn't factor the time a driver is waiting in between drives. For drivers who average 25 hour per week of engaged time during a calendar quarter, Uber and Lyft will provide "subsidies equal to 82% the average California Covered (CC) premium for each month." For those who average between 15 and 25 hours of "engaged time" each quarter, the companies will provide healthcare subsidies equal to 41 percent the average CC premium for each month.

"They purport to have a healthcare reimbursement piece here, but it's very weak and very few drivers would qualify, or at least qualify for the larger amount of it,"Jacobs said.

Rey Fuentes,Skadden Fellow at the Partnership for Working Families, told Salon that drivers would essentially have to drive 40 hours a week to get that 25 hours of engaged time to qualify for the best offer. In a report Fuentes co-authored, he notes a second way in which drivers will be essentially cheated of quality healthcare options. "By using the definitions section to ensure that the maximum benefit is actually 82 percent of an average premium payment for the lowest-cost healthcare plan on the Covered California insurance exchange, not a worker's actual premium expenses," the report states.

2. Drivers won't be guaranteed paid leave or paid sick days

Under the current California state and federal law, app-based workers are required to have a minimum of eight weeks of paid family leave, and three days of paid leave for illness or care of a family member. None of this is part of Proposition 22. In the report Fuentes co-authored, the researchers call this omission "glaring," especially in the pandemic, in which many rideshare and delivery drivers are considered to be "essential workers."

"Although some app-based companies have created limited sick leave benefits to respond to this crisis, these plans are voluntary and temporary, and cannot be added to this initiative before voters can weigh in on the ballot measure," the authors write.

Fuentes says there are many drivers who drive to make money to help support a sick family member.

"They're doing it because they're caring for individuals who have illnesses and families, or they have an illness themselves that they can't have traditional employment because your work arrangements are precarious," Fuentes said. "That's why it's actually more important that those workers get things like paid sick leave or paid family leave."

Since drivers have to work at least 40 hours a week to reach 25 hours of "engaged time," taking a vacation will likely affect whether they qualify for healthcare benefits.

3. Drivers won't be able to unionize

This year, more drivers have been organizing to protest unfair labor practices and the lack of protections during the pandemic. However, if Proposition 22 passes, drivers won't be able to unionize and leverage the power of collective bargaining. Under federal law, according to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), app-based drivers are said to lack benefits of collective bargaining because they're more like "entrepreneurs," legally speaking. While the legality of this is disputed by various labor organizations, Fuentes said this leaves an opening for states to "establish a separate organizing statute that gives workers the lawful ability to form a union under state law."

"The ballot initiative, however, would prevent the state legislature from ever considering a collective bargaining regime unless it gets a 7/8ths vote of the state legislature, which is an impossible threshold," Fuentes said.

4. Proposition 22 reverses key worker benefit if there's a car accident

"From a driver's perspective this is actually one of the things we think is so harmful about the ballot initiatives," Fuentes said. "California provides workers compensation protection to drivers injured on the job, and that benefit is covered through what is called no-fault coverage."

Even if they are at fault for the accident or contributed to it, all workers in California are covered by the workers compensation statute. Fuentes said Proposition 22 "reverses that."

"This suggests to us very clearly that workers could be denied coverage if they're even partially at fault, which is not something that should ever happen with a workers compensation scheme," Fuentes said. "And the broader part is that workers who are seriously injured and partially disabled or permanently disabled, you can access that up to a lifetime benefit through California's Workers Compensations Temporary Disability Program, but the ballot initiative capped at two years."

5. These reversals and precedents will be most likely permanent

Most astonishing is that Proposition 22, if passed, will be very difficult to amend, since that would require a seven-eighths (87.5%) vote in each chamber of the California State Legislature. Fuentes said this will "lock in" a "permanent underclass of workers."

"All the historic workplace safety protections that California has enacted to protect workers, all of those things are still vitally necessary and even more so now during COVID-19," Fuentes said. "From an abstract perspective, the idea that some of the richest companies in the world are passing a ballot initiative that would exempt their workers from basic labor protections is just, I think beyond the pale."

==

aha: biden and i think kamala opposed single payer tho neg attack ads claimed she did? VA and DoD medical care is rebuke to pvt hmo, and a potential market to extract/grift in (as is medicare, amazing that trump is talking about cutting going into an election he's losing that he desperately needs sr cits; are they literally not hearing this (on fox?) or think it will only happen in distant future to those OTHER ppl?

// attempt pvt USPO?  what happened to maralago VA scam?

an 8/20

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-defense-secretary-wants-to-privatize-military-healthcare-using-budget-cuts/

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-why-the-tormented-conservative-mind-is-so-drawn-to-the-dangerous-allure-of-miracle-drugs/

no lnx

Here’s why the tormented conservative mind is so drawn to the dangerous allure of miracle drugs

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 3, 2020

In one of the oddest developments of the coronavirus crisis, there’s been a run on a pair ofantimalarial drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which are used primarily in the U.S. to treat arthritis and to prevent organ damage from lupus. The drugs are being sucked out of pharmacies at an alarming rate, thanks to Americans who have convinced themselves these drugs will save them if the develop COVID-19, and thereby leaving patients who actually need these medications in danger.

This is happening in the face of only thin evidence that these drugs work against the novel coronavirus, and plenty of evidence that they don’t work. At one Paris hospital that used the drug heavily — on the recommendation ofDidier Raoult, a climate change-denying French doctor with a shady reputation— the results suggest these drugs are not effective at all. Chinese doctors also concluded they were useless. These drugs are known to have some scary side effects, including sudden cardiac death in some patients. They are also notorious for psychological side effects, such as paranoia and nightmares. At least one person in the U.S. has died from swallowing aquarium cleaner that contains a similar chemical compound.

So why are so many people so eager to get their hands on drugs that are clearly dangerous and may do no good?

The most immediate reason is simple: The people rushing the pharmacies are Republicans, and both Donald Trump and numerous Fox News personalities have told them these drugs are a “game-changer” that can save them from the coronavirus.

But there’s a reason these false or unproven claims are resonating with the ordinary citizens of Trumpistan. The hope that there’s a hard-to-get miracle cure that will save them speaks directly to the poisonous social Darwinism that guides modern conservatism. It reflects deep hostility to the very concept of a shared public good and a fierce attachment to a racialized ideology of individualism that treats public goods such as health care as things to be hoarded by those with the privilege, money and status to do so.

Conservative ideology simply doesn’t allow for the possibility that anything, including pandemic management, is best managed with a “we’re all in this together” mentality. Instead they’re drawn to this fantasy that there’s a Platinum Member COVID-19 status that can be purchased, which will allow them to opt out of the suffering of the plebeian class that has to quarantine or risk sickness and death.

There’s no question that Trump and other right-wing figures are pushing this hydroxychloroquine angle hard. Trump has talked about these drugs several times during his daily propaganda-dump “press briefings,” as well as on Twitter.

Laura Ingraham of Fox News has been hyping this stuff heavily, hosting a doctor who misleadingly argued that “this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic” Wednesday night. She’s also had tweets removed by Twitter for promoting medical disinformation.

Sean Hannity of Fox News has been urging his millions of viewers to grab this stuff up as well, saying “I love the idea of off label use” and arguing that even if it doesn’t work, people have “right to try”— completely ignoring that these drugs are dangerous.

There are many other examples, carefully collected here by Media Matters. This kind of repetition works, and goes a long way towards explaining how enthusiastically right-wing audiences have latched onto these drugs as a possible miracle cure.

But hydroxychloroquine mania also flows from the rigidly hierarchical view conservatives hold of society, one where even basic necessities like health care should be differentiated along class and race lines. Public health measures like quarantine and vaccine are viewed suspiciously precisely because they involve everyone on an approximately equal basis. They long for a special kind of medical care, one that’s just for the people they see as better than everyone else.

This attitude has manifested in many ways before this crisis, most notably around the debate over health care policy. For progressives, the conservative resistance to a single-payer health care system is baffling, even viewed from the perspective of pure self-interest. Private insurance is expensive and unreliable, and since your plan is constantly changing, it can makes basic things like keeping a steady relationship with a doctor nearly impossible. A single plan for all Americans that covers us all in the same way would be cheaper and more efficient and take a lot of pain out of seeking medical care when you need it. That seems obvious.

But that’s just what conservatives don’t like about it: They don’t want a single plan for all Americans.The very idea of having the exact same health care plan as people they see as beneath them, especially lower-income people of color, causes an angry reaction. That’s what all the right-wing hysteria over “rationing,” in response to both Obamacare and the possibility of Medicare for All, is ultimately about.It’s not that you might have to wait in line for something like knee surgery, because that’s already happening under our patchwork private-insurance system. It’s that people you deem unworthy, due to skin color or class status, also get to wait in line and — heaven forbid — might be ahead of you.

(This attitude also explains the longstanding right-wing desire to police the food purchases of people on food stamps, to make sure they are sticking with “their” food and not buying conservatives feel are reserved for true and upstanding Americans. It also explains the often-hysterical levels of right-wing hostility to public transportation, which can be traced back to the end of the practice of sending black people to the back of the bus.)

In this worldview, certain kinds of health care are for grubby commoners, while the well-off white homeowner class should have its own elite status. This is also part of the reason that the anti-vaccination movementhas taken off in this country. Vaccinations, after all, are an unpleasant reminder that disease has no respect class or race, but sees all humans as basically equal, which very much does not fit with conservative ideology.

Unsurprisingly, then, anti-vaxxer attitudes have taken hold on the right, especially in the religious right, which has long been tightly intertwined with a hostility to the government defining and controlling public goods, and has favored widespread privatization of everything from education to welfare.

A lot of people believe that anti-vaccination attitudes are most common among New Age-style leftists, but in reality, Republicans are more likely to oppose mandatory vaccinations than Democrats. It’s largely Republican elected officials who are trying to roll back laws requiring vaccinations, and the religious right has increasingly promoted the idea that it’s better for kids to simply get diseases like the chicken pox than to vaccinate them.

It’s true that anti-vaccination ideology started off in lefty circles, but that happened largely among well-off white people who may vote Democratic but tend to live in highly segregated communities and tend to embrace reactionary ideologies like “attachment parenting” that prevent women from having employment outside of the home. Ultimately, the logic of anti-vaccination comes down to a belief that an elite lifestyle of organic foods and helicopter mothering precludes the need for sharing the same health care common people use, including universal vaccination. That this mentality would leap to Republicans, who would lean into it even harder, isn’t really a surprise.

The irony of the anti-vaccination movement is that the “elite” form of health care — organic food, a mother’s unwavering attention, chicken pox parties — is less effective than the universal policy that’s under disdain, which is vaccination. But that kind of logic, where reactionaries turn up their noses at the common good since it also benefits the proletariat, is hardly limited to health care. It’s also evident in everything from rejecting the local taco stand to thinking that hip-hop isn’t “real” music.

That tormented way of thinking is what’s driving the conservative enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine. The drug probably doesn’t work, and the side effects are scary. But getting a prescription for it helps set one apart from ordinary working people who are doing the stuff public health officials prescribe, such as washing their hands a lot and staying home (even though, for many, it’s meant the loss of jobs and steady income).

Even if a coronavirus vaccine is developed relatively quickly, don’t be surprised if many conservatives prefer the fantasy of hydroxychloroquine over having to submit themselves to the same jab that janitors and hamburger flippers will line up for. Most working-class people can’t afford to turn their backs on effective, preventative health care when they can get it.

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fringe idea bernie goes mainstream in dems 2018?  aca pre-exist key.

medicare for all/expansion

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medicare for All is cheaper: Multiple studies say M4A is more cost-effective than a public option

Igor Derysh / SalonFebruary 22, 2020

Two new studies found that the Medicare for All plan proposed by candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., would cost less than the public option…

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HISTORY  519

theconv

The role of government in the U.S. health care system has been contentious long before the recent emergence of Medicare-For-All proposals among Democratic presidential candidates. Advocates of so-called free-market health care have long described government intervention as “un-American” and “socialist.” Their arguments can perhaps be best summarize in the phrase let’s “get government out and let markets work in health care.”

Yet a closer look at the development of the U.S. health care system paints a starkly different picture. Indeed, publicly owned hospitals – that is, hospitals run by local, state, and federal governments – have played an important and substantive role throughout the country’s history. Government has always been extensively involved in the provision of health care in one form or another.

And to the surprise of many today, events could have taken a very different turn. The U.S. could potentially even have ended up with a British-style, government-run health care system. Yet, the country went a different route. Instead of expanding, public hospitals have been closing since the 1960s in large numbers. How come?

In my recent academic paper on the subject, I analyzed the creation and closure of public hospitals in California, the state with one of the most extensive public hospitals system in the nation. My findings indicate that when state and federal governments extended health coverage through programs like Medicaid and Medicare, all but the most well-resourced local governments in turn began closing their hospitals.

My findings bear implications for policy debates today. Advocates for any large-scale health reform effort such as Medicare-For-All should be mindful of the eventual unintended side-effects they may trigger.

Different systems

There are many different types of health systems depending on the extent and type of government involvement.

In a British-style system, government fully owns, operates, and staffs all health care facilities. Because government provides both funding and services, this system can rightfully be described as socialist.

At the other end of the spectrum is a health care system where government fully stays on the sidelines. That is, government provides neither funding nor services. Individuals are thus left to fend for themselves, no matter their health or financial status. Given the ubiquity of government today, a more realistic derivative of this system involves government taking on a certain amount of regulatory function.

The current system in the United States is somewhat of an amalgam of both extremes and everything in between. The Veterans Affairs and other government-run hospitals serve as a bookend on one end, and the individual market where consumers choose health care plans offered by private companies as one on the other.

Yet in the context of the U.S. system, it is important to note that public hospitals have played a role in this system since colonial times. For example, two of country’s most famous hospitals, Philadelphia General Hospital and New York’s Bellevue Hospital, were founded in the 1730s. Even today, public hospitals, run by both state and local governments, serve millions of Americans.

At the same time, federal and state governments have become significantly involved in the health care field. However, most of this involvement revolves around shouldering extensive funding obligations. And virtually all Americans benefits from this involvement in the form of Medicaid, Medicare, and tax deductions for employer-sponsored health insurance. However, only rarely does government directly take on the provision of services.

Notably, while policy details remain vague, Medicare-For-All would likely expand this role by eliminating any non-governmental payer while maintaining the private provision of services.

The unintended consequences of public programs

In their earliest days, public hospitals served as little more than holding areas for the poor. Yet over time, they have contributed tremendously to the improvement of the health of the nation.

These contributions ranged from providing services to the blind, the deaf, the disabled, the aged, and the mentally ill, to containing contagious diseases and epidemics, such as smallpox, tuberculosis, typhoid, leprosy, and venereal diseases.

They also trained the nation’s medical providers, provided care to prostitutes, health education to mothers, and vaccinations and screenings to all members of the community.

But then, starting in the 1960s, more and more public hospitals began to close their doors for good. What happened?

As I show in my recent paper, a major contributor to these closures were expansions of public health coverage programs beginning with the New Deal, and culminating in Medicaid and Medicare. The programs removed the onus from local governments to provide for the needy and sick by shifting the responsibility to state and federal governments. Providing care for the poor was no longer a housekeeping function of local governments. Government shifted from a role of locally producing services to one solely financing them.

After all, the “deserving poor” could always get coverage through the new and growing joint state-federal programs.

Developments in California, the state with the most elaborate system of local hospitals by the 1960s, are emblematic for the nation. While the state’s network of county hospitals reached near-universal coverage into the early 1960s, only a dozen or so hospitals remain open today, including Zuckerberg General in San Francisco and Harbor/UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Ultimately, only well-resourced local governments were able to keep their doors open, and the state’s poorest communities where left out.

We are losing more than buildings

Undoing the nation’s safety net of public hospitals has had crucial implications for the nation’s health.

For one, there are direct implications for the broader health care systems. Public hospitals have disproportionately shouldered key roles that private providers often loathe to take on. These include trauma and burn care, provider education, and access for minorities and populations that are hard to serve like those with HIV or substance abuse problems.

Moreover, throughout this nation’s history, public hospitals have served as a backstop for the poorest members of society. With continued closures, access for the most destitute becomes even more challenging.

While some members of society have gained access to public health coverage, it is important to remember than many have been left out. Indeed, eligibility guidelines for programs like Medicaid continue to excluded most childless adults in many states, no matter how poor. Of course, immigrants both documented and undocumented, are also generally excluded from these programs. Individuals losing coverage for failure to comply with Medicaid work requirements are just the newest members on this list. Any Medicare-For-All proposal is unlikely to address all of these shortcomings.

It is also important to remember that replacing local institutions like public hospitals with federal and state programs introduced significant vagaries into the safety net. While a public hospital’s doors are always open, it is relatively simple for Congress and the President to alter eligibility for programs like Medicaid. Medicare-For-All coverage today thus can turn quickly into lack of insurance tomorrow.

Crucially, these developments have also taken questions of health care access off local agendas. With the discussion shifted to the state and federal level, caring for our neighbors has become a more distant concern to be handled down at the state or national capital. Unquestionably, one may be more hesitant cutting access for someone down the street than for some faceless person across the country.

Going forward, all health care reforms including Medicare-For-All should be mindful of potential side effects. Importantly, they should pay attention to the crucial role public hospitals have played in this nation, and ponder the implication of their ongoing demise.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/i-felt-americans-needed-to-know-insurance-industry-whistleblower-gives-glimpse-into-effort-to-crush-medicare-for-all/

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3/19

• Sean Hannity even said that parents are in hospitals killing babies in gladiator-style entertainment. Needless to say, that is not happening.
• Death panels are back!The previous lie of the year about the Affordable Care Act has returned, with Fox host Mark Levin suggesting that "Medicare-for-all" will lead to senior citizens being murdered.
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• A Fox contributor is arguing that "Medicare-for-all" would be communist

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/new-york-city-to-guarantee-health-care-for-all-residents-regardless-of-immigration-status-or-income/

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https://www.alternet.org/economy/trumps-budget-director-reveals-plans-attack-social-security-and-medicare

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AN

"Easy to pay for something that costs less': New study shows 'Medicare for All' would save US $5.1 trillion over 10 years

By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

"Medicare for All promises a system that

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ballot measures in Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah to expand Medicaid didn't just draw out a lot of voters; it might have created some, and not just for the midterm election. Evidence from the last four years of the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion suggests that people who get Medicaid turn into voters.

An author of one of the studies, Jake Haselswerdt, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, says, "We can confidently say: When you expand Medicaid eligibility, participation goes up." The theories include the fact that Medicaid has been shown to increase financial stability as well as mental health treatment, and has meant particular improvement for people suffering from depression. Maybe they have more capacity, both in time and in their personal well-being, to participate. It's also possible that enrolling hooked them into the mechanisms of getting registered to vote and then voting.

Maybe it's the greater investment they have in their government by having it work for them. "These are programs that have a major effect on people's lives," said Andrea Campbell, a professor of political science at M.I.T. who is an expert on the politics of Social Security. Seeing government work and having it work for you can raise the stakes and spur greater involvement.

Whatever the reason, a handful of studies have used the example of Medicaid expansion, comparing adjacent counties in states that accepted the expansion with counties in states that did not. Expansion counties have a 3-4 percentage point increase in registrations AND voting. What isn't clear at this point is how durable that increase is, since we only have four years’ worth of data to work with.

But with health care front and center in the political debate this cycle, and almost certainly in the next as well, chances are pretty good the trend is going to stick around a little longer.

https://www.alternet.org/medicaid-expansion-doesnt-just-make-people-healthier-it-makes-democracy-healthier-too

koch loss

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/11/16/koch-machine-suffers-major-losses-its-health-care-agenda/

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/medicare-all-will-destroy-gop-because-voting

Now we know why the GOP is trulyterrified of Medicare for All; it will wipe out the Republican Party’s control of the House, Senate, White House, and most state governments. Because it could make it very easy for every citizen over 18 to vote.

Here’s how it works.

In Canada, every citizen has a Canadian government-issued “Health Insurance Card” (you can see Quebec’s card at the link). It’s largely only available to citizens, as all citizens are eligible for the Canadian Medicare system; everybody else has to work out other insurance options (yes, there are insurance companies in Canada). And in most provinces, the card has your photo and works as an ID card as well as a driver’s license or passport.

And the Canadian government also explicitly says right here on Quebec’s elections website that your Medicare card is also your first-choice voter ID card. An American version could work identically, perhaps with a star or hologram or other mark to identify citizens as opposed to Medicare-eligible permanent residents, etc.

As Tarek, a Canadian listener to my radio/TV program, shared with me this week:

“Here in Canada, citizens and permanent residents alike are covered by publicly funded health care that is administrated through the provinces, whereas temporary residents must be covered via other means, namely buying private health insurance.

“Since it is in everyone’s best interest to be have ‘free’ health care coverage, unlike other government issued identifications, such as driver’s license...etc, the vast majority (if not all) Canadians from all socioeconomic backgrounds make sure to obtain their health cards, which can be used as an official photo ID for flying domestically, buying alcohol and more importantly voting!”

Here in the U.S., ever since Jim Crow, racist white “conservatives” have used a variety of means to prevent poor people, people of color, low-income working people, students, and older people from voting. Techniques have varied over the years, starting with poll taxes and so-called “literacy tests,” and now are carefully calibrated by cutting voting sites, reducing early voting, and even disenfranchising North Dakota’s Native American population.

The GOP stepped up their voter suppression game in 1980 when Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and Moral Majority co-founder and Reagan campaigner Paul Weyrich, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people; they never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

In that, he was following on an old Republican strategy of caging and polling-place intimidation, which earned William Rehnquist his rock-star status in the GOP back in the 1960s.

This is still the GOP game plan, although they’ve turned it into an art form. First, they spent a decade whipping up fear about “voter fraud”—brown people from Mexico voting in our elections, something that happens as often as 5 or 6 times per election cycle nationally (as opposed to over 130 million citizens voting). Then, they use this non-threat to pass voter ID laws that make it hard for people who don’t drive (old age, can’t afford a car, live in a big city and use public transportation, or live on campus) to vote.

For example, in the run-up to 2012, Pennsylvania House Leader, Republican Mike Turzai, declared, “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to carry the state of Pennsylvania: Done!”

While it didn’t quite work out that way in 2012, the Pennsylvania GOP came back in 2016, along with 26 other Republican-controlled states, to purge over 16 million people from the voting rolls nationally… helping give Pennsylvania (along with Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin, according to Paul Waldman in the Washington Post) to Donald Trump by razor-thin margins far smaller than the number of voters purged and/or turned away at the polls.

Meanwhile, another estimated 2 million Americans tried to vote but were turned away for lack of the proper ID in 2016.

Republican voter suppression is thriving in the U.S.: The Brennan Center documents a 33 percent increase in voters purged during the 2014-1016 election cycle (16 million), compared with the 2006-2008 cycle (12 million purged), as the GOP has made ID and purges (along with fear mongering about brown-skinned people) their main electoral strategy. In just the past year, as many as an additional 14 million voters have been purged from rolls nationwide, while over the past two decades every Republican-controlled state has introduced rigid ID laws.

But with a national ID system in place that’s universally used because it’s the key to getting your health care and medications, there’s no need for “voter registration” and thus no ability for the GOP to purge voters. Voter registration, after all, is a practice we largely got after the Civil War because Southern white politicians warned of “voter fraud” being committed by recently freed black people, and some Northern states used it to prevent poor whites from voting.

In some places in the United States, voter registration just never caught on: North Dakota never bothered to put such a system into place; you just show up at the polls with ID to prove you’re both a citizen and resident, and vote. And with a national Medicare for All ID, every citizen could easily vote, everywhere.

Republicans have aggressively opposed a national health care program for the United States ever since Harry Truman first proposed it in his November 19, 1945 address to Congress. We’re literally the only developed nation in the world without such a system. But its popularity is well over 50 percent in America right now, and growing rapidly among voters across the political spectrum; this is something that’s politically possible in the very, very near future.

In the past, GOP opposition generally revolved around their belief that everything from water to septic to roads to prisons to health care should be run to make somebody rich, and to hell with “the public good.”

But it’s a virtual certainty that the deep-dive think tanks and “wise elders” of the GOP also know how easy it is to vote in Canada and other developed countries, in very large part because of the national ID card that Canada’s (and most of Europe’s) Medicare for All programs provide at great ease and no cost.

Thus, the Medicare system’s threat to GOP voter suppression systems may be the largest reason they’ve spent so many hundreds of millions of dollars fighting single-payer in the U.S.

In most elections, in most states, and nationally in the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats win more votes, but Republicans remain in charge, because of gerrymandering made possible by voter suppression at the state level. Even the Senate is held in some red states purely because of voter suppression, leaning heavily on restrictive voter ID laws.

And, at the state level, in many—perhaps a majority—of the so-called “red states,” Republicans hold control of state legislatures and governors’ offices only because of voter suppression, ranging from voter-roll purges to voter ID laws.

If all U.S. citizens had a free national ID that could also be used to vote, it wouldn’t take long for both Congress and most states to flip back from red to blue like they were during the Carter presidency, before the GOP started their “voter fraud” hysteria and began passing voter suppression laws.

With the GOP out of power at the state level, Democrats (and the few remaining ethical Republicans) could replace gerrymandering with good-government solutions like the non-partisan district-drawing commission put into place by California.

After that, it’s only necessary to clean up the handful of states that won’t let ex-felons vote (they’ll have a Medicare ID card, after all), to produce a clean, efficient, and fraud-free national elections system.

Then America will have joined the rest of the developed world, in having both a national health care system and a functioning democracy.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/reporting-bernie-sanders-medicare-all-plan-makes-media-forget-how-math-works

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https://www.alternet.org/we-need-healthcare-champions-not-puppets-documents-expose-big-pharmas-scheme-turn-democratic

a growing number of political candidates facing November elections proclaim their support for single-payer healthcare—which the majority of Americans want to replace the nation's current for-profit system—the Democratic primary for Hawaii's 1st Congressional District is shedding light on the insurance and pharmaceutical industry forces working against a transition to Medicare for All.

At least three of the six candidates running to represent the"reliably" Democratic district in Hawaii "took time out from their schedules to talk to a consultant dispatched by the Healthcare Leadership Council, a lobbying group that seeks to advance the goals of the largest players in the private healthcare industry," according to a new report by The Intercept.

Although much of the report focuses on the Hawaii race, as The Intercept notes, the Healthcare Leadership Council—which is funded by Big Pharma companies such as Pfizer and Novartis—spends more than $5 million a year representing the interests of "insurers, hospitals, drugmakers, medical device manufacturers, pharmacies, health product distributors, and information technology companies" across the nation.

The lobbying group reached out to and met with former state Sen. Donna Mercado Kim, Hawaii Lt. Gov. Doug Chin, and Honolulu City Council Member Ernest Martin, then crafted dossiers that included "their photos, biographical sketches, contact information for their campaigns, and a checklist for determining their positions on certain issues of importance to the Healthcare Leadership Council," based in part upon the candidates' answers to a survey about specific policy proposals.

The Intercept, which obtained and published the dossiers, reports:

Of Kim, the former state senator, the group's profile says, "She is very pro-market, opposes any attempt at single-payer, does not support price controls on pharmaceuticals, and agrees that Medicaid and Medicare need to be managed by the private market."

Chin is a "moderate Democrat that has represented healthcare providers in Med-mal lawsuits," said the Healthcare Leadership Council's profile. Chin, the survey noted, "supports the market concept advocated by HLC and does not think a single-payer/Medicare for All approach would work in Hawaii."

"Martin supports a majority of HLC's positions," the profile on the Honolulu City Council member says. "He does not want single-payer." But, the dossier noted, Martin needed better education on health policy.

In some cases, what the candidates told the lobbyist appeared to differ from what they told voters.

"Democrats running in a primary election will say they support 'Medicare for All,' but what do they say to lobbyists behind the scenes?" responded fellow candidate Kaniela Ing, a vocal supporter of Medicare for All and other progressive policies who did not meet with the healthcare industry lobbyists.

"We need healthcare champions, not puppets," added Ing, a state lawmaker and democratic socialist whose recent campaign ad has drawn national attention to the race.

People for Bernie, a collective formed in response to the 2016 presidential run of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—a longtime supporter of single-payer who introduced a Medicare for All bill in the Senate last September—turned to Twitter Thursday to share the report and urge progressives to help Ing get elected.

Of the other two candidates in the race, a spokesperson for Republican-turned-Democratic state legislator Beth Fukumoto told The Interceptthat the Healthcare Leadership Council had not contacted her campaign, and Ed Case, a former congressman and "Blue Dog" Democrat, did not respond to request for comment.

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https://www.alternet.org/here-are-5-democrats-who-are-supporting-single-payer-healthcare-their-2018-campaigns

...

Here Are 5 Democrats Who Are Supporting Single-Payer Healthcare in Their 2018 Campaigns

Is Medicare-for-all a winning policy platform? These campaigns are about to find out.

so far, Republicans have been unable to overturn the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. Obamacare, but that doesn’t mean that they have given up on the idea. And the November midterms could have a major impact on whether or not the ACA survives: if the GOP can maintain control of the House of Representatives while increasing its narrow majority in the U.S. Senate, the ACA is likely to be overturned. With Republicans determined to deprive millions of Americans of health insurance, it is important for Democrats to offer an alternative to all the preventable deaths, unnecessary suffering and medical bankruptcies that Trumpcare would inevitably cause. And in 2018, more and more Democrats are doing more than defending the ACA—they are following Sen. Bernie Sanders’ lead and coming out in favor of universal healthcare via a single-payer or “Medicare for all” system.

Here are five Democratic candidates who are making single-payer healthcare part of their platforms in 2018.

1. Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth. In 2010, it wasn’t Republicans who ultimately killed the idea of a public option for healthcare; it was the Democratic leadership, who realized that they didn’t have enough Democratic votes in the U.S. Senate (which Democrats controlled at the time). The ACA—which was based on Republican ideas that had been proposed by the Heritage Foundation, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and President Richard Nixon—was the Democrats’ big compromise. The fact is that the ACA is very Republican-influenced no matter how much President Donald Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and other disingenuous Republicans deny it. And because Republicans are so treacherous and deceitful when it comes to health care, Democrats need to be as bold as possible—even in a state like Kentucky, where Rep. John Yarmuth is seeking reelection and has voiced his support for single-payer healthcare. Yarmuth, who is running against Republican Vickie Yates Glisson, isn’t using the term “single payer”; he prefers framing it as “Medicare for all” because “everybody knows what Medicare is; you don’t have to explain it.” But the bottom line is that even in Kentucky, Yarmuth believes that universal healthcare has become “very safe ground” for Democrats.

2. Braddock, PA Mayor John Fetterman

Braddock, PA Mayor John Fetterman, a Bernie Sanders ally who is running for lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, has been consistently outspoken in his support for universal healthcare—and while he has applauded the gains of the ACA, Fetterman has also asserted that it doesn’t go far enough and that ultimately, he wants to see a single-payer system adopted in the U.S. Fetterman, in fact, ran decidedly to the left of Pennsylvania’s current lieutenant governor, Michael Stack, in a Democratic primary earlier this year. And having defeated Stack, Fetterman—who Sanders has been campaigning for—will be bringing his pro-single payer views to the same ticket as incumbent Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf in November. Wolf/Fetterman will be one of this year’s most important gubernatorial tickets for Democrats; Pennsylvania is a major swing state that Trump won in 2016—and Fetterman is exactly the sort of candidate who can offer an attractive liberal/progressive alternative to Trumpism in the Rust Belt.

3. Congressional Candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

A major political upset occurred on June 26 when 28-year-old Sanders ally Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—a member of the Democratic Socialists of America—defeated Rep. Joe Crowley by a landslide in a Democratic congressional primary in Queens and the Bronx. Just as Fetterman challenged Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Michael Stack from the left in a primary and won, Ocasio-Cortez ran overtly to the left of Crowley—and single-payer healthcare played a prominent role in her campaign. Ocasio-Cortez, who is running against Republican Anthony Pappas for the seat that Crowley will be vacating in the House of Representatives, has stressed that healthcare should be a right—not a privilege. And she includes dental and eye care in her Medicare-for-all platform.

When Sanders introduced the Medicare for All Act in the U.S. Senate last year, he obviously knew that it wasn’t going to pass given that Republicans presently control the Senate. But it was important for him to roll the dice anyway, and one of the bill’s Democratic co-sponsors was Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin—who is seeking reelection this year. In a September 12, 2017 commentary for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Baldwin asserted that although she supported the gains of the ACA, she believed it was time to make health care universal with a Medicare-for-all system. And the Wisconsin senator described some of her own terrible experiences in pre-ACA America: because of a childhood illness that insured companies considered a “preexisting condition,” Baldwin couldn’t get health insurance for a long time.4. Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin

5. Texas Senatorial Candidate Beto O’Rourke

Texas politics are more nuanced and complex than some pundits believe: Democrats dominate local politics in major cities like Houston, Austin and El Paso, and whites are now a minority in the increasingly Latino Lone Star State. But Texas Republicans have an incredibly strong ground game at the state level, and a long list of Texas’ rural counties are deeply Republican. So, Beto O’Rourke, who is hoping to unseat far-right Sen. Ted Cruz in November, knows that he is facing an uphill battle. And one of the things O’Rourke is campaigning on is universal health care. O’Rourke has stressed that unlike Cruz, he wouldn’t vote to overturn the ACA in the Senate. But the ACA’s protections, as O’Rourke points out, don’t go far enough—and on Facebook, he declared, “A single-payer Medicare-for-all program is the best way to ensure all Americans get the healthcare they need.”

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http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-sen-lara-introduces-single-payer-1487307312-htmlstory.html

State Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) on Friday introduced a bill that would create a single-payer healthcare system in California.

Lara said that although the federal Affordable Care Act expanded health coverage, medical care is still too expensive, even for those with insurance, and the law excludes immigrants in the country illegally.

"We have reached a pivotal moment where there's a threat to healthcare," Lara said. "I felt it was important that we create a different narrative here in California."

A single-payer system would be a complete overhaul of the healthcare system. In such a system, one state agency would manage the financing of everyone's healthcare. Most likely, employees and employers would be taxed and the state agency would combine that money with the funds California currently has for Medicaid, Medicare and other health programs. When people would seek medical care, the state would cover the bill.

Single-payer legislation has been introduced many times in the state. The Legislature became the first in the country to pass a single-payer bill in 2006, but it was vetoed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

RoseAnn DeMoro, head of the California Nurses Assn. and a longtime supporter of a single-payer system, said she thinks the disarray in Washington around the proposed repeal of the Affordable Care Act makes now the perfect time to switch to a single-payer system.

"We're hoping it sails through and we can introduce the same healthcare system to America," she sai

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