Health insurance executives themselves are at risk because they’ve put profit before public health, says Joe Lauria.
Joe LAURIA
The One Percent, including health insurance executives with multimillion dollar salaries, may live in their “crenellated abbeys” cut off from the riffraff outside, “the external world that could take care of itself.” Until now, they have gotten away with a hyper-market system, a neoliberal economic model since the late 1970s, a system that has moved wealth from the majority to this tiny minority who live in “extensive and magnificent structures” apart from the population they defraud.
Part of this transfer of wealth involves a ludicrously expensive health insurance system that shuts out more than 80 million Americans. It is part of the hyper-individualism of American corporate culture. This message is: you are on your own. Until you are not.
They can shut their walls with “gates of iron” to poverty, a poverty they create, and pretend it does not exist. But they can not shut their bolted walls to a disease of high contagion. The utter disregard for the well-being of the entire nation is threatening them. Health insurance executives themselves are at risk because they’ve put profit before public health.
‘We’re Not Set Up That Way’
“The system is not really geared to what we need right now, what you are asking for. That is a failing. Let’s admit it. The fact is, the way the system was set up, the public health component that Dr. Redfield was talking about, was a system where you put it out there in the public and a physician asks for it and you get it. The idea of anybody getting it easily the way people in other countries are doing it — we’re not set up for that. Do I think we should be? Yes. But we’re not.”–Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in testimony to Congress on Thursday.
The U.S. is unlike the rest of the industrialized world, which, since the end of the Second World War, has had some kind of nationalized health insurance covering all citizens, regardless of their ability to pay. Many of the partisans who helped defeat the Nazis were socialists who demanded something in return from their governments after the war. Many British soldiers were Labour voters. They threw out war leader Winston Churchill in the 1945 election and the National Health Service was begun in 1948.
Though Harry Truman around the same time floated the idea of socialized medicine in the U.S., and the 1965 Medicare Act was to eventually cover all Americans, the greed of medical business interests has always won. It leaves millions of potentially infected Americans unable to be tested or treated. And that endangers even those in their high towers who “might bid defiance to contagion.”
“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
Socialism to the Rescue
When the oligarchs’ economic system crashed in 2008 from over-speculation, the U.S. government did the unimaginable. It nationalized industries to save them. It used socialism to rescue capitalism. But it was temporary. Once the economy had sufficiently recovered, the U.S. returned to its market fundamentalism.
If the coronavirus crisis approaches the numbers recent studies point to—as many as 240 million Americans infected and one million dead—expect serious consideration to a single-payer system sweeping through Congress and signed into law.
But once the virus is contained expect your premiums to rise again. Just like the nationalizations in the 2008 financial crisis, a temporary national health insurance would only be enacted to save the oligarchs from the Red Death.
consortiumnews.com