Chelsea Clinton maligns Bernie Sanders single-payer plan

x Embedded Content

This quick personal short is likely something that occurs thousands of times a day. While running the board for the ThinkWing Radio with Mike Honig Show at KPFT 90.1 FM, a Pacifica radio station in Houston, Texas, I had a potentially fatal blood pressure rise. A call was made to 911 and some great paramedics came, gave me oxygen, took me into the ambulance, gave me an EKG, and continued to monitor my pressure. It went down some, though remained at a dangerous level. When it was time to leave the paramedics asked if I wanted to go to the hospital in the ambulance, which hospital, or if I wanted to go in my own vehicle. I immediately inferred that they were cognizant that many folks are justifiably concerned about cost.

Since my EKG was perfect and the blood pressure had dropped some, I told them I would drive to an emergency room. My insurance encourages urgent care centers: I drove to a private emergency center—not knowing that it wasn’t technically an urgent care center—for my medical issue. After stabilizing my pressure, they told me to see my primary care physician.

The next day my primary care physician was completely booked. Another doctor in the office had an opening but since she was not my primary, I would have needed a referral. After going back and forth with the insurance company and the doctor’s office, I got an appointment that would take place two days later. They told me if there was an emergency I should go to the emergency room—so much for cost-saving and efficiency. I told someone in my primary care physician’s office, with the insurance company listening in via a three-way call, that a system that requires one to go the emergency room not because of lack of capacity or doctors, but because of an ill-conceived structure, is the problem with our healthcare system. An hour later I got a call from the office of my primary physician to come in immediately.

Since I do not get a subsidy for insurance, I purchased my insurance from a broker. All insurance whether on the Obamacare exchange or elsewhere must have the protections defined in the Affordable Care Act. Sadly, while the safeguards are there, they are useless if you are unable to use the system because of the controls that are clearly designed for profit maximization.

The complexity of using healthcare even under Obamacare is a travesty. Many are more concerned about finances in times of illness or injury, when all they should be thinking about is getting healthy or getting life-saving treatment. The number of decisions our system asks a patient to make at a time of need is immoral. What hospitals can I go to? Which doctor will take which plan? Can I afford a co-pay? Can I afford that ambulance, or should I risk driving?

A single-payer/Medicare-for-all system is the next step in our journey to a real humane healthcare system, a moral system and a provably less expensive system. When one removes the chaos created by multiple insurance companies partitioning our health delivery system for profit, health care becomes much less expensive. The sole purpose of an insurance company is to skim some of the premiums paid for a profit. They do that by managing risk. Managing risk ensures you get as few health care services as possible. The monies skimmed pay exorbitant executive salaries, duplicative administrative services like database management, advertising, capital costs, and much more. A single-payer system eliminates all of that.

Hillary Clinton and her team is characterizing Bernie Sanders’ support for a single-payer healthcare system as one that would kill many social programs including the Affordable Care Act. The inference the Clinton team would want one to make is much different than the reality: In a single-payer/ Medicare for all system, all are covered. Health care becomes a right. Implemented correctly, it’s funded by a progressively taxed income—which means most have skin in the game and pay what they can. Most importantly, there is only one risk pool: America.

As more Americans understand the realities, even Clinton supporters may balk. Folks will see further improvements to Obamacare as an appeasement to insurance companies, as opposed to a bold policy position that is friendly to the middle class and helps us all.

It will tie into the narrative of Hillary Clinton being owned by the corporatocracy.