Insurance is not healthcare: remove profiteering from the system

Latest

RN Maureen Cruise [right] speaks about the need to eliminate the profit motive from health care. She appears here with her fellow advocates in Health Care for All, L.A.
PHOTO/HEALTH CARE FOR ALL
 
Editor’s note: The following are excerpts from a speech by Maureen Cruise, RN, Director, Health Care for All, (L.A.) at the California Progressive Alliance in Berkeley in January.
Our current dysfunctional health insurance system is not just broken—it is destructive, dangerous and deadly.
Insurance is not health care. It is a predatory business of exploitation and extraction of profit, siphoning our money away from delivery of our care. The primary beneficiary is Wall Street. This is disaster capitalism in its most successful disguise.
The US is #1 in preventable deaths, 47th in the world for quality and access, 76th in maternal health. Life expectancy is diminishing. Deep disparities are systemic. People go without necessary treatments and lifesaving medicines due to cost. Over 50% of Go-Fund-Me pleas are people begging strangers for money online, so they don’t die.
Single payer health care for all now is the only real solution. We have serious opposition. We know our obvious opposition are insurance, hospitals, Pharma, medical device corporations and the banks, real estate, credit and debt industries.
But our most insidious and effective opponents are our false friends, funded by corporate donations to undermine real reform.
Money to obstruct single payer efforts flows to foundations, universities, non-profits, think tanks, media, government commissions, research Institutes and of course to political parties and politicians. Front groups tasked with maintaining the status-quo of profit extraction, confuse the public and divert our advocacy away from single payer. We are awash in these groups. Foundations funded by Wall Street industries award grants to doctor organizations, nurse groups, ethnic identities groups, social justice non-profits, anti-poverty champions claiming to be with us. Single payer may be on their website . . . but these groups sabotage it with strategies of disinformation, delay and diversion.
Posing as “compassionate” and “ethical” allies, they are subtle critics seeking to control the narrative with “concerns.” ‘We need more details! Isn’t this too complicated? Is this too massive a shift? People really like their insurance! How will we ever pay for it? We cannot do this all at once.’ Conceding power to the status quo, they avoid a genuine examination of solutions. The financial benefits of single payer are disappeared from the conversation as if they don’t exist.
Our current situation is an emergency. We must remove insurance. We must eliminate the profit motive. Every dime should be spent on our needs. Legislation is the first step, not the end of a convoluted road map. The elements necessary for a successful system are based on establishing health care as a human right: for all lives to be valued and protected equally.
#1. The insurance industry must be eliminated. Remove profiteering from the system.

+ 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

Students Walk Out Across the Country to Protest Trump’s Election

Read the speech delivered by a student at the student walkout at MSU two days after the Presidential election. Thousands of students nationwide walked out to protest Donald Trump's election and his policies on the same day.

Let’s Join Hands to Resist the Trump Agenda

Thousands of groups and millions of people are beginning to reach out to one another to resist the Trump agenda. Regardless of who we voted for, we the people, have a common interest in seeing to it that all our families are well taken care of, that all children are well educated and have a future, and that we have a society free of climate disaster, racism, bigotry and inequality.

How Democrats Ignoring Gaza Brought Down Their Party

"Many Americans roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction have no personal connection to Palestine or Israel. Their motive is not ethnic or religious. It is moral."

Undocumented Families Are Fighting for Our Future. Will You Join Us?

'As an undocumented mother, I can’t help but worry for my son’s safety first. As an organizer, my worry turns to resolve.'

Fighting for Climate, Students Walk Out Over Trump

"[The student nationwide] walkouts represent a call to action for both parties," said Sunrise Youth Movement, a group that advocates for political action on climate change.

More from the People's Tribune