Gainesville, Florida (Special to Informed Comment) — The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was alleged to comprise prices and make insurance coverage for well being / psychological well being care inexpensive. It did carry protection to twenty million however 30 million stay uninsured. Data point out that the unhealthy outweighs the nice. It’s too costly, unsustainable, overly advanced and bureaucratic. Even worse, it’s a reward to personal insurers and different 1% company stakeholders and profiteers in the neoliberal medical-industrial-Congression
Because the for- revenue, personal insurance coverage trade so completely dominates our well being care system as indicateds above, the fundamental idea, goal and system of medical health insurance is outlined by them. The U.S. subscribes to a personal enterprise mannequin of medical health insurance that defines insurers as industrial entities. Private insurers maximize earnings by primarily limiting advantages, maximizing well being coverage premiums or by not overlaying individuals with well being issues. Like all companies, their aim is to generate income. Under the enterprise mannequin, the greed of informal inhumanity is constructed in and the frequent good of the residents and nation is ignored; excluding the poor, the aged, the disabled and the mentally in poor health is sound enterprise coverage, because it maximizes revenue.
Although medical health insurance affordability for nearly all of US residents nonetheless stays elusive, President Biden’s medical health insurance plan needs to shift many extra {dollars} into personal, Wall Street insurance coverage trade arms. The takeover of medical health insurance by personal Wall Street entities continues apace as Democrats/Biden suggest to extend taxes and provides it to the personal revenue insurance coverage trade—the fundamental supply of our profound administrative waste, together with the expensive administrative burdens they place on the supply system that requires massive earnings. Profiteering continues unabated as personal insurance coverage sells us companies we don’t want/need , equivalent to deductibles and different price sharing, upkeep of slim networks, requiring prior authorization with elevated administrative prices, extreme ongoing paperwork/documentation necessities, all whereas avoiding paying for shock payments and different denied advantages.
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF THE NEOLIBERAL HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY:
1). Promote deregulation—working/lobbying for the elimination of presidency management over the trade. Historic examples of deregulated industries in the U.S. embrace the airline, telecommunication, and trucking industries.
2). Maintain, strengthen and enhance privatization—promote the switch of possession, property, or enterprise from the federal government to the personal sector. Examples of privatization embrace the medical health insurance trade, the correctional system in the type of for-profit personal prisons, interstate freeway system development, privatization of public faculties into personal constitution faculties, privatization of medical diagnostic and therapy companies equivalent to dialysis facilities, speciality hospitals and different outpatient items.
3). With neoliberalism, enhance switch of possession and management of financial applications/companies from the federal government to the personal sector; promote the personal sector’s affect on the financial system by reaching deep reductions in authorities spending by way of austerity and enormous cutbacks; discourage/block spending on all social welfare/psychological well being / public jobs applications (just like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930’s) and different state/native/federal authorities applications. Governmental austerity paves the best way for extra profiteering by those that search to interchange authorities applications with personal company entities.
Against this background, a burgeoning psychological well being disaster the place hundreds of thousands of Americans can not entry or afford psychological well being care has emerged. More than 10% of Americans with psychological sickness don’t have any well being protection, however even these with expensive industrial insurance policy can’t afford care. Commercial plans discriminate towards psychological well being care by limiting selection of lined psychological well being suppliers; paying psychological well being suppliers far lower than different well being suppliers; and proscribing or denying frequent remedies equivalent to prescriptions, psychotherapy/counseling and hospitalization. A rising physique of proof exhibits that ignoring psychological sickness results in extra illness, extra demise and better well being prices for everybody.
SOBERING MENTAL HEALTH STATISTICS:
1). Suicide is the tenth main explanation for demise general in the U.S., and the second main explanation for demise amongst youth and younger adults aged 10-34. The suicide price in the U.S. has elevated by 35% since 1999.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/healt
2). In 2019, 20.6% of U.S. adults suffered from a minimum of one psychological sickness, up from 17.7% in 2008. The proportion of Americans with critical psychological sickness in 2019 elevated to five.2%, up from 3.7% in 2008 https://www.samhsa.gov/da
3). Nearly one in ten (9.7%) youth in the U.S. had extreme main melancholy in 2018. The State of Mental Health in America
4). Drug overdoses prompted greater than 70,000 deaths in 2019, a 57% enhance from 2013. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr
5). Mental well being circumstances have elevated much more sharply amongst youthful adults. The proportion of Americans aged 18-25 with psychological sickness went from 18.5% in 2008 to 29.4% in 2019. The proportion of younger adults with critical psychological sickness greater than doubled, from 3.8% in 2008 to eight.6% in 2019. https://www.samhsa.gov/d
OPPOSITION TO PUBLIC MENTAL HEALTH/HEALTH PROGRAMS AND INSURANCES
Even with the harmful coronavirus pandemic, large insurance coverage and massive pharma proceed opposing laws for the brand new Medicare for All. These resistant, self-serving industries have probably the most to lose if their large earnings are redirected to direct affected person care for all. Individual and company predators regard democracy, authorities and neighborhood as obstacles to their greed and avarice, all the time putting earnings over particular person sufferers, households and public well being. It’s no marvel so many beholden members of Congress wish to defend the pursuits of huge insurance coverage and massive pharma, industries that spent $371 million on lobbying in 2017 alone.
HEALTH INSURANCE PROFITS-2021
US medical health insurance corporations beat analyst expectations and reported billions in earnings in the primary quarter of 2021, after making a windfall in the primary yr of the Covid-19 pandemic. The insurers’ success comes as small healthcare suppliers face unprecedented monetary stress and hundreds of thousands of Americans wrestle to cowl well being prices. The massive earnings reaped by the insurance coverage companies are also more likely to enhance criticism of the US healthcare sector.
The nation’s largest well being insurer, UnitedHealth Group, reported $4.9bn in earnings in the primary quarter of 2021 in comparison with $3.4bn in the identical interval in 2020 – a 44% enhance. The increased than anticipated earnings prompted the corporate to lift its projections for the yr. Anthem also beat estimates in its report of $1.67bn in earnings in the primary three months of 2021, a 9.5% enhance from the identical interval final yr. Humana’s web earnings was $828m in the primary quarter, a 75% enhance from the identical interval the yr earlier than.
CVS Health, which owns the Aetna medical health insurance supplier and drugstores, reported $2.2bn in earnings, up from $2bn in the identical quarter a yr earlier than. Cigna reported its web earnings fell to $1.17bn from $1.19bn in the identical interval final yr, however it nonetheless raised its forecasts for the yr. Together, the businesses signify the nation’s 5 largest well being insurers by membership. (The Guardian, May, 2021).
Neoliberalism help for privatization of medical health insurance is grounded in the philosophy espoused by University of Chicago economist, Milton Friedman. Friedman mentioned “the corporations should not take into account the public interest” and added that “the government itself should not take into account the public interest. The job of the government is to simply let everybody make as much money as they can, however they can”.
Classical economist Michael Hudson notes that Big Pharma , like Big Insurance, doesn’t need any sort of anti-monopoly laws . “Essentially you have what is called a free market, as advocated by Milton Friedman. A free market means the wealthiest people dominate the market and the supply of credit, the management of the economy that allocates credit, and who gets what shifts from Washington to Wall Street. It shift’s from the government to the private financial sector, and allows the financial sector to do the planning. One problem with this is the financial sector lives in the short run. So, it means that they only look for the next three months, the next year’s balance sheet, because the free market is so complex you don’t know what’s going to happen. Well, of course, since you’re managing it from Wall Street you in reality do know what’s going to happen but you don’t want to tell people exactly what’s going to happen”.
We have a number of a long time of expertise with neoliberal conversion of psychological well being companies/insurance coverage into a enterprise. Our well being care is being rationed, with care tips decided by profitability and secrecy determined in personal company boardrooms. To understand massive earnings demanded by Wall Street traders, our well being system should entice the wholesome and switch away the sick, disabled, the poor, lots of the outdated, and the mentally in poor health. So far, this nation has been unable to remove personal management of medical health insurance even in spite of the small worth it provides when 15 to 25 % of the well being care greenback is skimmed off for personal company revenue and overhead. Neoliberals keep away from the truth that if the prevailing public, non-profit Medicare program might be prolonged to all residents for each psychological and bodily well being and nonetheless containing decrease prices.
UNINFORMED VOTERS MAKE IRRATIONAL CHOICES
American voters have fallen sufferer to an elections advertising system who’s job is to create uninformed voters who will make irrational selections. In a personal business-run society, you market commodities, you market candidates. Most electoral campaigns are designed to marginalize and keep away from critical coverage points like inequality, insurances, psychological well being companies, public well being, Medicare, Medicaid, social companies, girls’s well being, DACA, progressive taxation, local weather change and so forth. Important financial points are averted with political vitality deflected onto wedge points, superficialities, character, rhetorical model, physique language, temper swings, tweeting and different matters that quantity to us foolishly chasing our tails. In the top, this enables the nation to be run by a few large 1% financial pursuits wanting solely after themselves. Many voters aren’t deluded as a result of they simply don’t actually see any actual selections or vital variations provided to them by Democrats or Republicans in the business-managed electoral system, the place sadly probably the most closely funded candidate nearly all the time wins.
Not solely have each main U.S.political events deserted concepts and innovation, however also deserted most voters. Republicans and Democrats alike are merely reactive to occasions/issues as demanded by their sponsors/donors in large enterprise, oligarchs and enormous unaccountable companies. 2022 politics in the US has devolved into one occasion, the “business party”, with two branches, democrats and republicans., who interact in and promote distracting contests giving us the phantasm that they’re principally totally different from each other on primary financial points.
Since a actuality TV star and actual property developer was elected president of the US, it’s clear that celeb tradition is a vital part of the company managed financial system that govern our lives beneath the “business party”. Buffoon politicians from each events have turn into shameless, beholden instruments and lackeys of company America. They provide us a satan’s discount mixture of self-serving poisonous applications and insurance policies, continuously altering their positions as quick as others change socks. Will Rogers wrote: “A fool and his money is soon elected”.
Conditions as described above have led to the statement that U.S.voters common needs can not be achieved as a result of there’s no automobile to specific their unhappiness, and there’s no method in which American voters can categorical what they need both in the Democratic or the Republican events as a result of they’re actually the identical occasion and are in full settlement with what they’re doing.
The voters don’t matter; keep in mind we’re speaking concerning the American definition of democracy, which is an oligarchy. Polls have proven massive common help by residents for Medicare for All, however neither political occasion has supported it. Michael Hudson writes that by “conquering the brains of a country by shaping how people think, you can twist their view into ‘unreality economics’ and make them think you are there to help them and not to take money out of them, then you’ve got them hooked.” This is how Big Insurance and Big Pharma keep management of U.S. medical health insurance. Our system is privatized, financialized and unregulated so that personal, large insurance coverage corporations can generate income”.
President Biden and lots of Democrats have spent their careers defending the monetary sector, together with large insurance coverage and massive pharma, whose coverage is also to take care of and additional privatize primary well being care financing and infrastructure. Economist Hudson additional notes that, “Biden’s long political career has been right-wing. He’s the senator from Delaware, the country’s most pro-corporate state—which is why most U.S. corporations are incorporated there. As such, he represents the banking and credit-card industry. He sponsored the regressive bankruptcy “reform” written and put into his arms by the credit-card corporations. As a finances hawk, he’s rejected Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), and also “Medicare for All” as whether it is too costly for the federal government to afford—thereby making the personal sector afford to pay 18% of US GDP for health-insurance monopolies, way over some other nation. That means blocking governments from offering primary companies at price or on a backed foundation—schooling, well being care/medical health insurance, roads and communications. Privatized and financialized economies are high-cost.”
CITIZEN’S UNITED SUPREME COURT DECISION: A DARK DAY IN AMERICAN HISTORY
January 21, 2010 will go down as a darkish day in the historical past of American democracy when editors of the New York Times wrote that the Supreme Court “Citizen’s United” determination that day “strikes at the heart of democracy” by having “paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding by reaching into the political process to hand unprecedented power to corporations.”
The Supreme Court ‘Citizen’s United’ determination opened the floodgates for large cash in our politics, permitting large companies and a handful of the wealthiest households to spend obscene quantities of cash in our elections. Citizens United is only one of a line of horrible Supreme Court selections holding that cash equals speech and companies are individuals beneath the First Amendment — thereby permitting large companies and the tremendous rich/oligarchs to purchase undue entry to members of Congress, and to successfully dictate legislative outcomes. This is important in coverage selections strengthened by affect of company lobbies, now additional enhanced by the Court’s determination which favors the very small 1% sector of the inhabitants that dominates the financial system. Our society is run by a class-conscious 1% enterprise neighborhood devoted to lowering the political and financial energy of the 99%.
Resistance to true marketing campaign finance reform, and powerful help for the U.S.Supreme Court’s, ‘Citizens United’ determination by unaccountable/unregulated massive companies and ultra-wealthy people/households, relies on their Machiavellian understanding of the aim of darkish cash in politics: to make use of darkish cash to vary political outcomes to favor themselves, the 001% oligarchs and turns into a menace to democracy as a result of its supply will not be made public. Dark cash is corruption that erodes confidence and belief in native, state and nationwide authorities and in each main political events. It’s used to throw referendums and elections from which might come a lot of right now’s social, financial, public well being, psychological well being and environmental issues. Dark cash is used to cover conflicts of pursuits and self promotion with bogus scientific controversies, pretend information and faux grassroots campaigns.
Corporate large enterprise ideology asserts that human society is a market, and social relations are industrial transactions with a “natural hierarchy” of winners and losers. Attempts to restrict competitors, change social outcomes eg, property tax difficulty, mandated medical health insurance, and so forth. is handled as hostile to liberty and massive enterprise pursuits. Count on the neocons/GOP to crush unions and collective bargaining, decrease or remove tax and public safety laws, privatize public companies and promote privatization of all social/psychological well being/well being applications. Inequality is okay because it’s a results of a reward for benefit and generates wealth for the tiny .001%, which the false neoliberal delusion says trickles down to complement everybody in the 99%. Tax and different social insurance policies to create a extra equal society are dismissed as counterproductive to the pursuits of the extremely rich.001%.
The assumption that regardless of the market produces is rational and useful is the bedrock of Western economies. And it’s improper , says economist Michael Hudson, as a result of It negates the truth that you really want some authorities energy sturdy sufficient to override the self-serving particular pursuits of oligarchs and different 1% company pursuits. And that takes a very sturdy authorities, which is why the free market individuals have all the time opposed sturdy authorities and why their financial fashions don’t give any acknowledgement for authorities funding in infrastructure that Biden needs or any authorities exercise that is ready to override that of the 1% rentier class, the monetary class, the property-owning class and the company monopolists. That’s the issue we now have.
“GOING THERE WITH DONALD TRUMP”: Adam Gopnik additional describes how this downside is exacerbated in his 2016 New Yorker article,“ Going There with Donald Trump”:
(Gopnik excerpts ready by Paul Street in CounterPunch, Aug 18,2022 article, “The Tendentious Mr. Brooks: the Chickenshit Conformist of the NYT”) …….. ‘an incoherent program of national revenge led by a strongman; a contempt for parliamentary government and procedures; an insistence that the existing, democratically elected government…is in league with evil outsiders and has been secretly trying to undermine the nation; a hysterical militarism designed to no particular end than the sheer spectacle of strength; an equally hysterical sense of beleaguerment and victimization; and a supposed suspicion of big capitalism entirely reconciled to the worship of wealth and “success” It is always alike, and always leads inexorably to the same place: failure, met not by self-correction but by an inflation of the original program of grievances, and so then on to catastrophe. The idea that it can be bounded in by honest conservatives in a Cabinet or restrained by normal constitutional limits is, to put it mildly, unsupported by history…To associate such ideas too mechanically with the rise of some specific economic anxiety is to give the movement and its leader a dignity and sympathy that they do not deserve. In France, Jean Marie Le Pen’s voters are sometimes ex-Communists, working individuals who also imagine their nationwide identification to have been disrupted by immigration. That doesn’t alter, or make extra sympathetic, the poisonous nature of his program; the ideology that it resonates to is an historical and chronic one, that thrives by way of good instances and unhealthy. That Trump can dominate an more and more right-wing nationalist occasion with a right-wing, white-nationalist creed is neither stunning nor all that difficult. Anyway, the notion that a class remedy can be had for a nationalist illness was the persistent, tragic delusion of progressive politics all through the 20th century.’
PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE IN FULL CONTROL OF MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES – STILL
With personal industrial insurance coverage corporations in full management, they proceed to additional limit psychological well being care by limiting or denying claims for hospital stays, outpatient (workplace) visits, medicine, psychotherapy/counseling, and different frequent remedies for psychological sickness and substance use issues.
1). Insurers are required by legislation to cowl psychological well being and different well being companies equally, however courts have discovered that they routinely deny claims based mostly on monetary — not medical — causes.
2). In one case, United Behavioral Health — the biggest managed psychological/behavioral well being firm in the nation — was discovered responsible of denying 60,000 psychological well being claims for monetary causes. The lead plaintiff in the case was an insured affected person who was denied protection and had paid practically $30,000 out-of-pocket for medically mandatory therapy. https://www.statnew
3). Commercial plans also limit entry to wanted medicines: A examine of 84 totally different industrial well being plans discovered that a majority of the plans lined fewer than 50% of antipsychotic medicines, that are important in treating sickness like schizophrenia. In one-third of those insurance policy, nearly all of antipsychotic medicines are solely supplied on a “restricted” foundation, requiring that sufferers pay increased out-of-pocket prices. https://www.nami.org/Support-
4). A overview of greater than 90 research exhibits that psychological and behavioral companies can cut back a affected person’s general well being care prices by a median of 20%. The Impact of Psychological Interventions on Medical Cost Offset: A Meta‐analytic Review
5). Experience with Medicaid exhibits that eliminating the waste and greed of economic insurance coverage improves outcomes and saves cash. In 2012, Connecticut’s Medicaid program abolished its industrial insurance-run “managed care” mannequin in favor of a nonprofit single-payer plan for enrollees. By eliminating the insurance coverage intermediary, Medicaid might make investments straight in psychological well being by integrating bodily and behavioral well being care and including community-based applications. Among Medicaid enrollees, emergency room visits have since fallen by 25%; administrative prices dropped dramatically, from 25% to three.5% of complete prices; and general well being prices
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MEDICARE FOR ALL MEANS MENTAL HEALTH CARE FOR ALL
Commercial well being insurers discriminate towards psychological well being care and hold Americans from getting the companies we want. There is a higher method: Single-payer Medicare for All would remove the greed and administrative waste of economic insurance coverage and canopy everyone in the U.S. for all medically mandatory care, together with behavioral and psychological well being companies, substance use dysfunction therapy, and prescription medicines. With Medicare for All, protection is lifelong and transportable, and companies are supplied with out the copays, deductibles, and shock payments that hold sufferers from getting care. And not like industrial insurance coverage, Medicare for All offers free selection of any hospital or supplier, together with psychiatrists, psychologists, scientific social staff, licensed psychological well being counselors, and licensed marriage and household therapists.
SUPPORT MEDICARE— A SOLID INVESTMENT IN OUR COUNTRY
Let’s always remember that Universal Medicare for All is a strong funding in all residents of our nation by merely selling a social service for common entry to inexpensive well being care insurance coverage for all. Aren’t we a society that cares sufficient to see that everybody obtain the well being care they want? That’s the fundamental goal of Medicare for All, and it’s definitely the correct factor to do now with the Covid-19 pandemic.
The historical past of our most profitable nationwide medical health insurance program, Medicare, offers among the best arguments for increasing this system to cowl everybody. When Medicare was enacted 57 years in the past, following a broad grassroots marketing campaign, many believed the dream of a full nationwide medical health insurance system was proper across the nook.
Unfortunately, 5 a long time later, Medicare nonetheless has not been expanded. Most of the adjustments have been contractions with increased out-of-pocket prices for beneficiaries and repeated makes an attempt at privatization by large pharma, the medical health insurance trade and its “champions” in the White House and Congress.
It’s time to finish insufficient and harmful medical health insurance applications. Insist on actual medical health insurance reform important for people and households. American historical past is crammed with examples of basic, democratic change led to by profitable mass motion and public strain towards the counseling of the neoliberal, privatization, 1% self-serving oligarchs/vested curiosity crowd. No extra ready! Ask your legislators to completely help Medicare For All now. Join nearly all of Americans who help improved Medicare for All. Ask your legislator to help laws now filed in the House (H.R. 1976) and Senate (S. 4204) that would set up this badly wanted reform.
Full text-HR 1976.
https://www.congress.gov…(S.4