Demand the Impossible! by Bill Ayers

Author:Bill Ayers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Current Events, Politics, ebook
ISBN: 978-1-60846-747-1
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

Six

Health Care Index

Rank of United States among eleven wealthy countries in health system performance (2013): 11

Rank of United States among the countries of the world in annual per capita public and private health care spending (2013): 3

Life expectancy in years of a typical US citizen (2012): 79

Rank of United States out of 224 countries in average life expectancy (2015): 43

Administrative costs as a percent of hospital spending in the United States/Canada (2011): 25.32/12.42

Number of Black/white deaths per 1000 in the first month of life (2013): 7.46/3.34

Number of Black/white deaths per 1000 in the first year of life (2013): 11.11/5.06

Number of Black/white children under two who contract bacterial meningitis per 100,000 (2005): 26/11

Cost of Prevnar, a vaccine that prevents diseases (ear infections, pneumonia) caused by pneumococcal bacteria per dose (2014): $136

Amount of revenue that Pfizer, the monopolist and sole manufacturer, realized from Prevnar in 2013: $4 billion

A perfect contradiction was on display in Washington, DC, in 2009 at a political rally called by the Tea Party Patriots. Participants came together in universal opposition to the Affordable Care Act, but their messages varied. “Obamacare Is Slavery,” said one sign, and “Don’t Tread on Me!” said another. There was also a large two-sided banner with one face reading “No to Socialist Medicine,” and the other demanding that the government “Keep Your Hands Off My Medicare!” Of course, Medicare, like the Veterans Administration hospitals and the benefits that members of Congress enjoy, is predicated on something that most people want: good health and a health care system that delivers for all. Everyone is vulnerable to the vagaries and unpredictabilities of life, and so all of us benefit from the security that comes from being insulated from the financial shock of serious injury or illness, even if many of us will never suffer that fate; all of us gain when people get the low-cost health care they need at a price that we can jointly afford. It’s not complicated. And it is indeed mildly socialistic—the system is still driven by profiteers and predators.

Those are the same ideas that motivate the drive for a single-payer health system: equalize the financial risk between the healthy and the sick, the well and the wounded, take all profit and market incentives out of the system, crush the health insurance racket, and create a simple social contract built on shared costs and guaranteed benefits. Medicare is an imperfect but sensible single-payer health care plan for the elderly and the disabled. It’s similar in conception to national health care in Canada and throughout the industrialized world.

Of course Medicare—government-run health insurance for the elderly—was fiercely opposed by conservatives and political reactionaries when it was proposed half a century ago: “We are against forcing all citizens . . . into a compulsory government program,” said one; it’s nothing less than “socialized medicine,” and, if implemented would mean that “one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

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