Tayler Gonzalez is 32 years old, athletic, and engaged to be married; earlier this year, he suffered a stroke and needed extended rehab to recover. His insurance company, UnitedHealthcare, inserted themselves between Tayler and his doctor, saying that they wouldn’t pay for it, so Tayler and his fiancée just put up a GoFundMe page to cover the cost.
Welcome to America, where six Republicans on the Supreme Court say that it’s totally legal for massive corporations to pay off judges and politicians to keep their profits up. Even politicians slated to possibly become the Speaker of the House.
UnitedHealthcare is the third largest company in America, as John Oliver pointed out Sunday night, ticking through a long list of similar outrages. It’s first president, “Dollar Bill” McGuire, made about $1.5 billion dollars during his time with that company. To avoid prosecution in 2007 he had to cough up $468 million, but still walked away a billionaire. Stephen J Hemsley, his successor, made off with around half a billion.
Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens.
We’re the only one that lets for-profit companies and the vultures who run them stand between us and our physicians, making life-and-death decisions often based off an algorithm that’s main purpose is to jack up profits for the insurance companies and the morbidly rich oligarchs that run them.
That’s it. We’re the only one.
As a result, we spend more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP.
Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.
Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable US payroll, whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10%.
We are literally the only developed country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf after they’ve skimmed hundreds of billions off the top. The for-profit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.
And it’s not like we haven’t tried to remove this parasite. As I pointed out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all proposed and tried to bring a national healthcare system to the United States.
Which raises the question that our corporate media literally never, ever ask out loud in public but should be the very first one we’re all demanding answers to:
“Why are for-profit insurance companies involved in medical decisions at all?”
Why should a neurosurgeon have to beg an insurance corporation for permission to rehabilitate a 32-year-old stroke patient? Why should some low-level employee sitting behind a desk, who knows their employer makes more money when it pays fewer claims, get to second-guess the doctor standing next to the patient?
More than 60 years ago, a Baptist preacher who’d run for office in Saskatchewan, Canada asked essentially the same question.
In 1910, when Tommy Douglas was six years old, he injured his leg and, lacking access to a doctor or hospital, it healed badly. The wound continued to hurt and fester until, four years later, the infection worked its way deep into his leg bone itself.
In desperation, his parents took him to a doctor, who said that surgery to open the leg and clean out the wound would be too expensive and complex for the family to afford; he’d have to amputate the leg. By happenstance, another surgeon at the hospital “took an interest” in the case and offered to do the surgery for free if his medical students could watch, a deal the Douglas family made, saving the leg.
‘‘Had I been a rich man’s son,’’ Douglas wrote, ‘‘the services of the finest surgeons would have been available. As an iron molder’s boy, I almost had my leg amputated before chance intervened and a specialist cured me without thought of a fee.’’
Douglas eventually entered politics and by 1959 was the premiere of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan when he proposed a province-wide program he called Medicare, charging $5 a month and providing full medical, hospital, and dental coverage for all Saskatchewan residents of all ages.
In the leadup to the vote, the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) worked together with insurance companies and Saskatchewan’s conservative elite to fight Douglas’s proposal tooth-and-nail.
They raised a war chest unseen in previous Canadian politics, flooding the airwaves and newspapers with warnings of “socialism!” and delivering detailed indictments of “government-controlled medicine” to every home. Provincewide, local Chambers of Commerce and Boards of Trade held public rallies charging Douglas and advocates of Medicare with communist leanings, saying they’d destroy the very fabric of the nation.
One anti-Medicare propaganda piece said that Douglas’ proposal would drive so many physicians out of Saskatchewan that, “They’ll have to fill up the profession with the garbage of Europe; some of the European doctors who come out here are so bad we wonder if they ever practiced medicine.”
Nonetheless, Douglas prevailed and Saskatchewan got Medicare for all its citizens. The people of the province loved it and those in others wanted it.
Medicare and Douglas’ popularity in Saskatchewan provoked Prime Minister Diefenbaker to work with him to bring Saskatchewan’s Medicare program to the entire country with the first successful federal legislation to accomplish this introduced in 1961, splitting the costs roughly 50/50 between federal and provincial governments.
Again, the CMA, AMA, Chambers of Commerce and other business organizations launched a campaign, this time nationwide, of vilification similar to the earlier one in Saskatchewan, highlighted by a 23 day nationwide doctor’s strike in 1962 in protest of “socialized medicine,” along with “racial slurs, red-baiting, acts of violence and threats of blood in the streets.”
The “Keep Our Doctors” committee — a 1960s astroturf version of the Koch Brothers’ 2009 Tea Party — joined in, with the Billy Graham of Canada, a rightwing priest named Athol Murray, telling a nationwide radio audience, “This thing may break into violence and bloodshed any day now, and God help us if it doesn’t!”
Nonetheless, Canadians could see with their own eyes how well it worked in Douglas’ Saskatchewan: a national Medicare system was fully implemented when the last province ratified it 1966, making Douglas a national hero and helping Diefenbaker maintain his hold on federal politics until he died in office in 1979.
It hadn’t been easy for Douglas. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (their federal police force, like our FBI) harassed and spied on him for decades, compiling an official file on him covering over 1,100 pages.
He’d been burned in effigy numerous times, threatened with death, and was accused by the American Medical Association and their Canadian brethren of communist leanings, alternately depicted in conservative media as a “Nazi, Stalinist or both.”
Despite it all, today every Canadian has comprehensive health insurance provided by that nation’s Medicare program, and Tommy Douglas, “the father of Canadian Medicare,” has repeatedly been selected as the most popular Canadian in history.
It’s easy to imagine that the third largest company in America, and its peers that are also billion-dollar behemoths, will launch a similar attack against Democrats who work to get a single-payer program for America.
After all, it’ll mean the loss of billions to the companies, even though it’ll save an estimated 100,000+ lives a year, end medical bankruptcy (we’re the only country in the world that even has such a thing), and save our country trillions of dollars over the coming decade.
We have fire and car insurance because we don’t expect our house to burn down or our car to get in an accident; we insure against high-cost low-probability events and that makes sense.
But every American gets sick, every single one of us will one day face the costs and difficulties of dying, and healthcare shouldn’t be treated the same as a house fire or car accident.
It should be normal and routine, no drama, and little or no cost to individuals because it’s responding to a universal need. Everybody in — because we’re all mortal human beings — and nobody out for lack of money.
Last week, Congressman Mark Pocan, a former chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a regular on my radio/TV program, told me and my audience that he thinks healthcare will become “the defining issue” for this 2026 and the 2028 elections.
Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries, who’ll lead Democrats if they take the House this fall, says that he doesn’t support Medicare for All, the system that Canada and most every other developed country in the world has.
Clearly Jeffries doesn’t have the courage that Douglas did. But many other Democrats do, and we need to do everything we can to encourage them and have their backs.
One may well end up being remembered, like Douglas is in Canada, as the most beloved politician of modern times.
Louise’s Daily Song: “Why the Hell is a Corporation Making Your Medical Decisions?”
Comments on Monday’s Daily Take:
Did Ayn Rand Plant the Ideological Seed That Trumpism Is Harvesting Today?
Nearly all of the people I know who are self-proclaimed hardcore Republicans boast of being Ayn Rand fans. That serves to validate Thom’s post today in my book.
~ tomonthebeach
A historical horrifying excerpt of “evil is as evil does” we are witnessing in real time. Thank you Thom and ALL, for your knowledge & educating is keeping me sane !!
~ Roger Schwellenbach
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Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club
The September book of the month is Looking Backward, From 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy. Buy a copy or download it for free here.
This is a utopian science fiction novel published in 1888. When Julian West falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 Boston, he awakens 113 years later to find America transformed into a socialist utopia. Through conversations with his guide, Doctor Leete, West discovers a radically reimagined society where industry is nationalized, goods are equally distributed, and citizens retire at 45. This bestselling novel sparked a political mass movement and inspired over 162 discussion clubs across America.
This is the prime moment for leaders with courage and vision for a new nation. Hakeem Jeffries, Corey Booker, and Chuck Schumer are NOT those leaders.
The insurance is the toll booth of life: 1. Life 2. Health 3. Mortgage 4. Vehicle. I’m sure there are more….retail products.