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

Another Big Beautiful Betrayal for Rural America

You slash Medicaid, you’re swinging an axe at the heart of our rural hospitals, community clinics, doctors and nurses — and every family that depends on a job for a living. It’s not too late to raise hell.

ICE Terror Campaign Threatens Us All

Several recent Facebook reels show how ICE is ramping up its campaign of terror against immigrants, citizens and protestors alike as the effort to create a police state continues and resistance grows. One creator speaks to the significance of Haitians now being targeted.

Medicaid Defenders in Wheelchairs Arrested Ahead of Senate Budget Vote

Over 60 people, including grandmas in wheelchairs, were arrested in the U.S. Senate Rotunda in a nonviolent protest against cuts like Medicaid and the SNAP food program in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Budget Bill.”

Zohran Mamdani Delivers Stunning Blow to ‘Billionaire-Backed Status Quo’ in NYC

New York City proved that a movement powered by hope, courage, and working class people can beat the money of billionaires.

The American People Want Peace, Not War!

The US's immoral and illegal attack on Iran threatens the whole world with war. The American people have a special responsibility to come out into the streets and rein in the US government, which has become a rogue state.

More from the People's Tribune