Single-payer healthcare has always been the major chink in the armor of neoliberalism, so expect a full-court press of propaganda in any discussion of it. The idea that a “market” must be interjected between any government spending and the people the government is Constitutionally mandated to benefit via money creation has been carefully cultivated since the ’70s by a very concerted effort between corporate-funded career politicians and the media that also depends upon that funding source.
The result of such interjection of a non-productive cost factor that is all but unregulated is threatening the very existence of our healthcare system currently, only being propped up by voter ignorance and blind ideologues using America’s false nationalism to justify such large gaps in both cost and outcomes between it and any other modern rich country in the world. No, we are “NOT” automatically the best at everything because “freedom”, and we never were.
The biggest fear the health insurance industry has had over decades of conservative/neoliberal dominance of our government is that we might actually end the “socialist” Medicare/Medicaid program and force them to fit the sickest and oldest half of patients now covered by the government into its present demographics. Doing so would topple our entire healthcare system, and likely our economy with it. Insurance “IS” socialism, but with an obscene profit margin “gifted” to the elite oligarchy by political corruption and voter ignorance.
The biggest hurdle proponents of single-payer face is the perpetual demand that they show how the program would be “paid for” when attempting to pay for it may be the worst possible course for our nation. Single-payer will be an extremely “deflationary” move for our economy, taking a trillion dollars per year out of the economy, albeit unproductive, and causing around a million workers to be unemployed involuntarily. Clawing back another three trillion because we insist on applying household and gold standard budget rules to the monopoly issuer of the nation’s currency would spell disaster for our economy already struggling to meet the Fed’s inflationary targets.
I know that the econ teams of both Bernie and Warren are aware of this because I regularly read their communications and talk with some of them. Both are targeting taxation to those who should be taxed higher just because they make more money than is healthy for our country and its democratic process, but I’d be very surprised if the end result of either’s plan would remotely resemble what they are now suggesting. It turns out that the Achilles heel of democracy is — — democracy. Whodathunkit?
