36 thousand people died last year and every year because they don’t have health insurance in America. Just let that sink in for a second. 9/11 was a little under 3,000 people. That’s twelve 911s per year. This is not a spectacular event. It doesn’t have it at 36,000 people at once. We just ignore it but it is a fact it happens every year. People in other countries don’t understand what that means. They’re like, wait, I don’t get it, you just let people die? And our answer in America seems vicious and deeply immoral to them because yeah we just let them die.
People who come into the emergency room in America right before they die. They never came in for checkups because they have no insurance so we never caught their disease so they come into the emergency room to die and that’s what we have here in America so let’s just acknowledge the depth of the depth of the problem.
Some talk about it would cost too much to insure everyone. No, NO it’s the exact opposite of the truth that’s why it’s maddening that this wasn’t covered by cable news outlets! The reality is it costs nine thousand eight hundred dollars per person in america for every person. Other countries have a health care system measured by doctors and experts that is demonstrably better than ours. They have better health care by how much it costs them and in results. If it costs ninety eight hundred dollars per person for us it must cost other countries what maybe fifteen thousand? No, four thousand six hundred! We cost nine thousand eight hundred to get worse results they cost four thousand six hundred and get better results so why are we doing this??????
And our doctors spend half their time filling out insurance forms. Bureaucracy we’ere talking about a bureaucracy! All they do is deal with insurance companies! Hey my patient is dying for gods sake can I give them some sort of treatment??? Well I don’t know you fill out the forms and have them fill out the forms and we’ll see what happens.
Some guy comes in and he’s got a four dollar deductible the next person comes in has the same exact problem has a twelve hundred dollar deductible so one of them gets to live the other one gets to die because he doesn’t have twelve hundred dollars. Other countries have no deductibles, no premiums, no co-pays.
Just think about that for a second and what a sigh of relief we would all have as a country. Some say covering everyone is not practical. No OUR SYSTEM as it is now is not practical it’s the most expensive it is double what almost all developed countries pay for and we get worse results and we stress ourselves out about how we are going to afford it. Other countries have no deductibles, no premiums, no co-pays, and no insurance forms to fill out.
This one actually got to me the most I don’t know why but no medical bankruptcies so no one has to ever worry if they got hit with cancer am I gonna lose my house am I gonna lose my business?? Hey my mom or my wife or my uncle had a stroke are we all finished? Are we all done because we all have to put all of our money in to try to save their life and then we’ve lost our house? The rest of the developed world is asking what kind of a monstrous system says you get a health care problem and you don’t have the right insurance you picked the wrong thing etc and that’s it bankruptcy.
The good thing is we don’t have to invent a new system we already have it it’s medicare and it is among the top two most popular programs in the entire country. Social Security is number one. Medicare is number two. All we have to do is let other people in expand it from 65 and older to everyone. We already have a system that works and that’s incredibly popular so people are racing to get to 65. People are working at jobs they don’t want to work at because it has decent health insurance. Some people go back to work out of retirement because a family member gets sick so they have to hang in their until they turn 65. Why do we ask the whole country to wait till they are 65? We already have the system why don’t we just let everyone in so you can have a little bit of relief? And again its cheaper so it makes no sense not to do it.
Here’s why we don’t do it. The PhRMA industry alone, not the rest of healthcare, just the PhRMA industry and not in campaign contributions, just in lobbying, spends 3.6 BILLION dollars a year so that’s why we don’t have a far more rational system that costs less that covers people better that allows us relief and decency and equality.
Other countries treat poor people, middle, and rich people the same they all get health care. Imagine if in America we were all treated equally and it actually cost less money and the only reason we don’t is because we have an insane system where we allow Private PhRMA companies to spend billions of dollars corrupting our system through lobbying campaign contributions. The NUMBER ONE donors are not the oil companies. They’re not the banks. It’s the PhRMA companies and lo and behold they have monopolies.
The one problem with Medicare is because the government is so bought and corrupt by these companies that medicare is not allowed to negotiate with drug companies. What do you mean you can’t negotiate with drug companies? You represent the people how could the companies rule the people????
Well that’s what we have in America and that’s why we have the disastrous system that we do.
We know that government bureaucrats know how to bring down the number from age 65 to 1 or zero because they keep pitching raising social security eligibility. They keep calling medicare for all a pie in the sky idea but it’s not it’s fundamentally pragmatic. We don’t have to pay any more money to get health care for everybody in the USA. We have to keep pushing that single payer doesnt cost any more money thats the thing people need to remember and that it saves money because you no longer have deductibles, premiums, or co-pays.
The effect of income inequality on health care outcomes is real because the greater the income disparity the worse the health is for the poor.
Health care costs is the tapeworm in the belly of our economy it’s actually hurting our businesses it’s not helping them. It actually creates an incentive for companies to be more immoral. I’m going to be a decent person and pay for my employees health care but the guy next door doesnt pay for their health care go get medicaid instead and put it on the tax payers, now they have a competitiveness advantage over me because I actually care about my workers I want to make sure that they have health care. That is an INSANE system. We should not have that system.
We are subsidizing the walton family because walmart paid the wages of their workers so low they know that they’ve got to go to medicaid and we pay for their workers and then they use that to drive mom and pop businesses out of business in the middle of america.
So none of this makes any sense. We’ve got to change the system. Luckily the answer is really simple we already have medicare all you have to do is say now everyone is eligible instead of just people over the age of 65.
– Transcribed this from a Young Turks Video. You can find “The Young Turks” on youtube and google searches.
Tom