You should not become bankrupt just because you get sick. That seems to me to be an obvious requirement for any civilized society. But that is not the case in the US. As a new study of bankruptcy court filings reveal, medical expenses are the most common cause of bankruptcies in the US. This has been true for some time and it is significant that the Affordable Care Act (known popularly as Obamacare) has not changed the numbers.
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The Democratic party establishment tries to walk a tightrope. Their party base favors a whole slew of progressive measures. But the party hierarchy consists of either members of the oligarchy or people who are beholden and enamored of it. So they end up saying one thing publicly and another privately to their wealthy donors. We are seeing this now with the idea of Medicare For All as a means of providing universal health coverage. What was portrayed as utterly radical when Bernie Sanders proposed it during the 2016 campaign has caught fire within the party within an incredibly short time, so much so that every single Democrat who has announced a run for the presidency this year has expressed support for it, a remarkable turnaround.
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It is well known that because of the power that the pharmaceutical industries wields over the political establishment in the US, Americans pay far more for drugs than people in other countries. Bernie Sanders exposed one such case where a drug that had been free suddenly started costing a whole lot more.
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According to a new report from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health says that the annual per capita expenditure on health care in the US is $9,892, almost two and a half times the average spent by OECD countries which is $4,033. It is well known that the health outcomes in the US are well below those of those countries so we are spending a whole lot more and getting a whole lot less.
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Thanks to a sustained effort, the idea of Medicare for All as a way to introduce universal health care coverage has become part of the mainstream conversation. It is no longer seen as the fringe issue it was portrayed as when Bernie Sanders spoke in favor of it just a few years ago during his campaign for the presidency. It played a big role in the congressional elections and Lee Fang and Nick Surgey have obtained a document that outlines how the health industry is gearing up to launch a fight against it.
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The billionaire Koch brothers, massive funders of all manner of right-wing candidates and organizations, who are totally against any government regulations that hinder their ability to make money (especially environmental and climate change measures), conducted a survey to measure public opinion on various issues and, would you know it, while the public agreed with them on vague general principles such as “the right to personal property is key to a free and just society”, on practical matters the public seems to be in favor of the very things they hate.
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Ryan Grim and Zaid Jilani report on a new study that finds that adopting the Medicare For All plan advocated by Bernie Sanders that is increasingly supported by politicians and the public would not only improve the availability and quality of health care and cut costs but also result in increased wages for people. But what is noticeable is that this study was not done at some leftists but by a former Bush administration economist and issued by a conservative think tank.
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The Guardian has been running a series called The Mother Load that looks at what happens to pregnant women in the US. Giving birth can be expensive enough even when things go smoothly, but if there are any complications at all, the costs can go so far off the charts that families are ruined. Jen Sinconis writes about what her family went through when her twins were born very prematurely. It is a harrowing tale, not least because while the parents were worrying themselves sick about how to enable their tiny children to survive and grow, they were being socked with massive bills. This was 11 years ago before Obamacare came into being that removed lifetime caps on insurance payments and eliminated pre-exiting conditions clauses that limited coverage. Those two features alone would have made a huge different to them, though they would still have incurred major costs.
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Imamu Baraka was leaving work in Baltimore when he was stunned to see security personnel from the University of Maryland Medical Center take a woman and leave her out in the cold at a bus shelter and dump her things next to her on the ground. Despite the weather being near the freezing point, she was wearing just a flimsy hospital gown with no shoes or underwear. You can see the video he took here.
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