Medicare for All, a central initiative of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, has been subjected to a non-stop barrage of criticism from liberal pundits and Democratic leaders.
Unknowingly or not, the pundits and party leaders have consistently couched their attacks in language specifically and strategically promoted by corporate insurers and others profiting off the provision of healthcare.
Profit-making centers of power in the healthcare system have been engaged in a decades-long campaign to shape media coverage and popular understanding through injecting carefully-selected terms designed to distort the nature of Medicare for All. (The full story of this campaign has been carefully studied by the National Economic and Social Rights Research Institute)
Rather than being a “government-run” system — to use one of the most central phrases in the insurers’ effort, Medicare for All, governmental bodies would essentially replace insurance corporations while doctors’ practices and hospitals would remain in private hands. By eliminating some $600 billion in excess administrative costs, as estimated by the Annals of Internal Medicine, a revamped healthcare system could eliminate co-pays and deductibles which now make insurance too expensive to actually use. Moreover, Americans would be restored the right to choose their own providers and hospitals without the interference of insurance corporations.
The system would be financially feasible with the massive savings on administrative costs and profits, coupled with modest increases in taxes for consumers that would produce a net reduction with the elimination of co-pays and deductibles. US firms would face a far more competitive position int the world economy. For example, auto firms operating plants in the US pay about $4 more per employee per worker than their factories in Canada, according to the Canadian Auto Workers union.
But the Medicare for All system—in place in Canada, Taiwan and a host of other nations, has been caricatured systematically by both liberal and centrist candidates, pundits and advocacy groups. Here’s just a handful of examples:
Michelle Cottle, New York Times editorial writer: “A plan to blow up that system and throw 149 million people off their private insurance, while embraced by progressives, is viewed more skeptically by moderates and swing voters.“ Cottle shamelessly creates the impression that Medicare for All would leave them without any protection of their healthcare, and for an indefinite period of time. In reality, Medicare for All is designed to provide a smooth transition to government-administered insurance so that no one faces an interruption in their care, as occurred in Canada and elsewhere.
Cottle goes on to cite recent public-opinion surveys. “A poll conducted in the fall by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Cook Political Report found that 62% of swing voters in the former ‘blue wall’ states of Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin consider Medicare for all a ‘bad idea.’”
However, some polling has been marked by mis-characterizations of Medicare for All as “government-controlled” healthcare and questions about alleged defects of the plan. The Cook/Kaiser result is far off the results of earlier, widely-accepted polls which have consistently found support among Democrats in the 70% range.
Despite the ferocious attacks on Medicare for All that have become standard fare in major media,, Business Insider’s poll last August showed a showed, 59% of respondents (not just Democrats) who get their health care coverage through their employer said “they would be fine switching to a government insurance plan under ‘Medicare for All’ — as long as it meant no change in coverage.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination: Repeating the argument made so often by voices like Cottle, Klobuchar claimed, “Medicare for All would mean kicking 149 million off of health care.” Again, we see the scary vision of half of Americans callously thrown off a cliff with no healthcare safety net.
Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress, a high-profile think tank and advocacy group (which receives some of its funding from health insurers). Tanden directly invoked the right-wing bogeyman of “big government” so central to the plans of those defending the status quo. “If you’re worried about a Trump Administration now, just imagine if the government has control of everyone’s health care. And I say that as a big-government liberal.” As noted earlier, the government role would focus on replacing profit-driven private insurers and ensuring that consumers are freed of restrictions on choice and unburdened by co-pays and deductibles
Former President Barack Obama, clearly referring to Medicare for All in a speech late last year, stated, “This is still a country that is less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement,” the former president told a group of wealthy donors, as the N.Y. Times reported. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it,” Obama said. Obama’s comments can be read as an effort to defend his signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, from those pointing out its limitations: leaving about 30 million uninsured, failing to provide a “public option,” leaving drug prices untouched, and subsidizing for-profit insurers.
An anonymous voter: while the Times and other publications have provided little commentary from grass-roots advocates of Medicare for All, they prominently printed a quote from a critic: last Nov. 25. They quoted one voter who said, “America is about choice — not, oh, suddenly we have a gigantic bureaucracy that may or may not work.”
All of the attacks have led N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman, who believes in Medicare for All as a distant goal, to conclude that Medicare for All is not on the agenda for some time. Krugman argues. “The reality is that whatever its merits, universal, government-provided health insurance isn’t going to happen anytime soon…even if Democrats take the Senate in addition to the White House, the votes for eliminating private health insurance won’t be there; nor will the kind of overwhelming public support that might change that calculus.”
Whatever the outcome of the current fight over Medicare for All, Krugman can look to the misleading claims of fellow columnists and reporters, as well as “moderate” and even liberal Democrats, for the highly visible resistance to Medicare for All among the People Who Really Matter.
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based labor studies instructor and longtime progressive activist and writer who edited the Racine Labor weekly for 14 years. Email winterbybee@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2020
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