Get Employers Out Of Healthcare
America needs to join the modern world with a Universal Healthcare system.
Half of all Americans are unhappy with their job. Even more Americans are unhappy with their benefit packages. A corporation has every incentive to find the cheapest benefit package they can to fulfill their requirements instead of finding the best quality for their workers. So why are we supporting a system where our employer controls our Healthcare?
And the even bigger question: Why does our country put the burden of providing healthcare on businesses?
This isn’t what other nations do.
I pay $1500 a month, and it doesn’t include vision. Not one dime is subsidized by the government, and it is not from an employer. $18,000 a year before any of the out of pocket expenses from visits or emergencies. Despite this, there are still places where our coverage isn’t accepted. They will accept the same insurance company, but only with employer based plans.
The cost is equivalent to 25% of the yearly median income in the US and yet we still face restrictions and additional healthcare bills. My wife’s pregnancy check-ups have been an additional $100-$200 out of pocket each visit.
America’s healthcare system is a mess. This is one of the rare acknowledgements that is shared across party lines, age ranges, and genders. Despite this, America continues to make little to no progress improving the situation.
Healthcare is too expensive.
There are too many additional fees when going to a doctor.
There is in network, out of network, HMOs, PPOs, flex spending, and more. It is too complicated.
Anytime you change jobs you may have to find all new doctors.
Prescription medication can be outrageously expensive.
Dental doesn’t cover most extensive care.
Eyeglasses are a borderline scam thanks to Luxottica controlling the bulk of the market.
Despite the wide majority of Americans agreeing on these points, our healthcare system remains an expensive mess year after year. All thanks to healthcare lobbyists and big money donors with agendas. These groups pay politicians to lie about the healthcare situation in order to steer policy in their favor.
Universal Healthcare has been portrayed as being expensive, having long wait times, and even as having concepts as ludicrous as death panels. Communism has been used as a label by people who don’t understand the difference between communism and socialism.
America is the only highly developed nation that doesn’t have a government healthcare system for all of its citizens. Only 42 other countries share the stage with America for lack of government healthcare; several Asian nations including China, middle eastern countries and many African nations.
The reason Universal Healthcare is so universal around the world is because while capitalism is a good system for driving innovation and invention, it is a terrible system for making sure people are cared for. That is where the government steps in with social programs designed to make sure their citizens have what they need.
When you hear someone say they are against Universal Healthcare, it is typically because they’ve been told it is bad, or unamerican, by a politician. They haven’t researched what it would entail or how America could approach such a change.
An easy way to test this is to ask them what Universal Healthcare system they’re referring to and what they feel the issues are with that system. Great Britain has a very different system from Germany and they both have a very different system than Japan. Universal healthcare is simply a term for government based healthcare for all its citizens. There is no single solution that all nations use.
A robust system for the needs of America would be single payer healthcare. This simply means that all Americans are on the same healthcare plan run by the government. It would allow the government to negotiate prices on medical equipment as well as prescriptions. And it would be more efficient than the system we use now.
Inefficiency is where a shocking amount of healthcare costs come from. The number of doctors has risen slowly in America, but the number of healthcare administrators has skyrocketed.
700,000 Americans died from heart disease and 600,000 died from cancer in 2021. The highest rates among our peer nations. Our government is already supporting programs that are helping to reduce these numbers, such as Produce Prescriptions. With a Universal Healthcare system, these programs can be expanded across the whole nation, improving health and extending lives.
Combine Universal Healthcare with a change in government subsidies from highly processed foods to healthy fruits and vegetables, along with ensuring that all Americans have proper access to these healthy foods, and America could easily increase the average lifespan by 5 years or more while further reducing the cost of healthcare.
Both sides of the aisle have worked on improved healthcare bills for our country over the years. When Obama was working on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, his team took elements from both Republican and Democrat plans in an effort to create bipartisan legislation.
The problem was that we have entered a new age of identity politics which also brought with it obstructionist politics. No longer did members of Congress oppose a bill on the grounds of how it affects their constituents. Now they opposed bills simply because the other party wants it.
You may remember one aspect of the ACA was an individual mandate. Anyone who didn’t have healthcare had to pay a fine, which helped ensure that most Americans adopted into the system which in turn ensured that costs stayed low.
Republicans ended up being against this measure to such an extreme degree that they brought court cases which went all the way to the Supreme Court where the individual mandate was overturned.
The thing is, the individual mandate wasn’t a Democrat idea, it was a Republican one. It was used in Republican healthcare reform plans back in the Clinton era, and was later adopted by Mitt Romney(R) for the Massachusetts healthcare system, one of the defining, successful, programs the ACA was most influenced by.
Before the ACA, Mitt Romney had said that he felt the Massachusetts healthcare laws were a great program that Republicans widely supported, including the individual mandate. But then, once he ran for President against Obama, he criticized everything about the ACA, including the individual mandate.
This is what happens in American politics today. Even if one party likes an idea, if the other party also likes it or if the other party would “score points” by passing a bill, then the first party now feels the need to oppose the ideas.
It isn’t about working for the American people, it is about gaining as much power for their political party as they possibly can.
This form of politics is bad for American citizens. It blocks important legislation that can help improve people’s situations or even save lives.
Opposition politics is the only reason we don’t have a Universal Healthcare system in America.