The "CEO candidates", Clinton, Edwards, Obama and their pro-corporate health care plans [View All]

As moderator of Thursday’s Democratic Presidential debate, here’s a follow-up question: Do you think your plan is better than Medicare-For-All, or do you fear being attacked as an extremist by Republicans, big insurance, and big pharma and so propose a less effective plan as more politically pragmatic?

The leading Democratic candidates–Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama– criticize America’s broken health care system and call for fundamental change with great rhetorical flair. But when it comes to proposing the most effective plan for change–Medicare-For All– they don’t show an audacity of hope. They show a paucity of courage. <skip>

Obama, Edwards and Clinton are great at denouncing the problem. But they are timid when suggesting the solution. <skip>

Hillary’s 1993 plan and Obama’s and Edward’s 2007 plans all try to build reform on top of the twin pillars of the current flawed American health care system–private insurance and employer-provided benefits–while attempting to fill in the cracks. The problem is that these twin pillars are rotting from their foundations and any reform built on them is likely to collapse.

The first pillar of the system–private insurance–is an inherently flawed means of providing health care. First, the incentive of a private insurance company is to find ways to deny needed care–the less care provided for the same premiums, the higher the profits and the bigger the salaries and bonuses of their top executives. So private health insurance companies pay huge staffs to review claims and deny coverage. Michael Moore’s “Sicko” shows horrifying examples of people who actually have health insurance coverage but suffer from lack of care because insurance companies wrongly denied their claim, and presents eloquent testimony from former insurance company employees about how they were promoted and award bonuses for finding ways to reject coverage.

Second, private health insurance involves a colossal waste of money. Nearly 1/3 of private health insurance premiums go to administrative costs of underwriting (i.e. turning down insurance applications from consumers who might actually need to use their insurance), claims processing (i.e. denying as many claims as possible), marketing and advertising, plus shareholder profits and multi-million dollar executive salaries and bonuses. By contrast, Medicare’s administrative run approximately 2-3% of costs. At the same time, to deal with numerous different insurance companies and their varying claims procedures, doctors and hospitals have to employ large staffs, not to provide care, but just to process insurance claims. Approximately 20% of doctor’s income goes to the overhead of processing insurance. It has been estimated that approximately $350 billion a year of health care dollars goes to administrative costs. Saving most of these costs alone could pay to insure the tens of millions of uninsured Americans in a Medicare–For-All system. <skip>

The type of hybrid private/public health care patchwork health reform proposed by Obama, Edwards, and Clinton is a vast, untried social experiment which has never been proven to work anywhere in the world. The type of health care program that works–a single payer government run service–has already proven itself in virtually every other capitalist democracy. The US spends twice as much per capita on health care as Britain, France or Canada, yet America ranks only 39th in the world in the health of our people. Life expectancy is shorter and infant mortality higher in the US than in most other wealthy countries. <skip>

Moreover, polls show that Americans are ready to accept single payer health insurance. A recent poll by the Pubic Policy Institute of California found that “by a two-to-one margin, most prefer ‘a universal health insurance program in which everyone is covered under a program like Medicare that is run by the government and financed by the taxpayers’ nationally to ‘the current health insurance system in the United States, in which most people get their health insurance from private employers, but some people have no insurance’ The preference here is a descriptor of what is known as ’single payer.’”