PHOTO/HARVEY FINKLE
If you’re dangerously ill, good healthcare may be the only thing between you and dying. Yet in America healthcare has become a profit-making $3.2 trillion-a-year business, and you will be allowed to die if you don’t have insurance or money. It’s estimated some 45,000 people die every year in America because they lack health insurance.
Neurosurgeon Russell Andrews writes about how the profit motive interferes with providing healthcare in the US. He complains that the long-term doctor-patient relationship has been replaced with impersonal “corporate medicine,” and that American medicine has morphed “from a function of humanitarian society into a revenue stream for healthcare professionals, drug and medical device companies, hospitals, and insurance companies.”
The top five health insurers— UnitedHealth, Anthem, Aetna, Humana and Cigna—handed out nearly $30 billion in profits to investors (in the form of stock buybacks and dividends) from 2013 to 2015. Aetna’s CEO was paid $28 million in 2015. The private insurers make their money by charging as much as they can and paying out as little as they can.
The profit motive is standing between us and universal healthcare, and it’s wasting hundreds of billions that could be spent on care and save lives.
The next step for America is a single-payer system (Medicare for all) where everyone has publically financed health insurance. And that is just a step toward where we really need to go: a publicly financed health system that completely removes the profit motive and rising prices, that nationalizes every aspect of healthcare—doctors, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, emergency services, etc.—and that guarantees high quality healthcare to everyone who lives in our country. Healthcare is a human right, and should be available to everyone who lives in our country. Healthcare can be a for-profit commodity, or it can be a human right, but it can’t be both.
