Why can’t healthcare be free in America?

Latest

Philadelphia protest to save Medicaid.
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.

PT Logo collage
+ Articles by this author

Free to republish but please credit the People's Tribune. Visit us at www.peoplestribune.org, email peoplestribune@gmail.com, or call 773-486-3551.

The People’s Tribune brings you articles written by individuals or organizations, along with our own reporting. Bylined articles reflect the views of the authors. Unsigned articles reflect the views of the editorial board. Please credit the source when sharing: ©2024 peoplestribune.org. Please donate to help us keep bringing you voices of the movement. Click here. We’re all volunteer, no paid staff.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Featured

Pushing People into a Really Bad System Will End Really Badly

President Trump's executive order fuses drug use and homelessness, ignoring that homelessness can cause or exacerbate substance use because people use drugs to cope with pain. Forced institutional settings rather than housing will not help the ill or unhoused.

Chicago Resistance Speaks: ‘Until All Are Free, None Are Free’

An uprising is growing as the government tries to impose a dictatorship. Chicago resistance leaders recently offered their thoughts in public remarks made at demonstrations and press conferences.

Los Angeles Continues to Rebuild and Resist

Angelinos, suffering from the profit over people economy, continue to rebuild after the fires and to protest immigration raids, while also experiencing joy in such difficult times.

Chicago Teachers Union Says: Trump, Stay Out of Our City

Chicago Teachers Union rejects any unlawful federal occupation of their city, while welcoming federal leadership that fully funds public education, restores SNAP, and expands Medicaid to healthcare for all.

Journalist Says Why ‘I Can No Longer Work With Reuters’

A photojournalist says why it is impossible for her to maintain a relationship with Reuters "given its role in justifying and enabling the systematic assassination of 245 journalists in Gaza."

More from the People's Tribune