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Remember the heated discussions about health care in the Republican debates? No, you don’t, because they were arguing about things like fantasy football. In fact, all we heard about health care was, “Repeal Obamacare!”
We get it, being a member of The Repeal Obamacare Club is a prerequisite for running for president on the GOP ticket, as is having no plan with which to replace it.
Jeb Bush promotes tax credits for individuals to purchase “affordable” and “portable” plans. We hope Bush thinks “affordable” means less than 10 percent of annual income, but given that he wants to retain the same insurance industry whose bureaucracy now consumes 30 percent of every health care dollar, it’s unlikely.
Ben Carson supports health savings accounts, a great idea for healthy and wealthy individuals, but a terrible idea for everyone else who would be more deeply trapped in increasingly expensive plans. It’s a particularly bad idea for women, whose annual cost of care typically is $1,000 more than it is for men.
Ted Cruz crows, “Repeal every blasted word of Obamacare.” With what? All the problems Obamacare addressed? Crisis treatment in ERs instead of prudent prevention? Denials for pre-existing conditions? Denials for people with the audacity to get sick and actually use their insurance? Annual and lifetime caps?
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Improved Medicare for All Act, co-sponsored by Rep. William Lacy Clay and 63 other U.S. representatives. It’s a comprehensive plan with robust details. It provides full coverage without premiums, like people enjoy in all other advanced countries, at roughly half of what we spend per person in the United States today.
Any candidate who isn’t forthcoming with these details is ignoring our current dire reality. Our health care system has a literal death grip on this nation. It is the new “giant sucking sound” of money being vacuumed from our entire economy and into health care’s deep, private-profit pockets.
More than another cycle of modest reform, we need to base our solution upon our nation’s most successful health care system, Medicare. We need to divorce our health insurance from our employers, releasing businesses from that burden and giving job mobility back to employees. We need to implement universal access to health care, paid for by progressive taxes, delivered by the world’s best doctors and hospitals. We need to replace our woefully wasteful private insurance system with the efficiency of Medicare.
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