Why Is the For-Profit Health Industry Like a Giant, Bloodsucking Tick?

And it’s not like we haven’t tried to remove that parasite

Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives, and already have their sights set on forcing major cuts to “entitlements” like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

One of the promises Kevin McCarthy made to become speaker of the House was to force a vote on dialing 2023/2024 spending back to 2021 levels — and there’s been a 7% inflation increase in costs/expenses since then. In other words, they want massive cuts.

His Republican colleagues have already outlined the starting point for their demands, as reported by Yahoo News:

“The Republican Study Committee proposed a budget for fiscal 2023 that would gradually increase the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare, and change the Social Security benefit formula for people 54 and younger…”

In that, they’re going to have a hell of a fight on their hands, as Sen. Bernie Sanders is taking over leadership of the Senate Health Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid. He’s already promising “a lot of subpoenas” will be arMartin riving at the offices of healthcare and big pharma CEOs.

A half-million American families are wiped out every year so completely that they must lose everything and declare bankruptcy just because somebody got sick. The number of health-expense-related bankruptcies in all the other developed countries in the world combined is zero.

Yet the United States spends more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of gross domestic product.

Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.

Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll (and don’t even cover all working people), whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10% and would cover every man, woman, and child in America.

We are literally the only developed country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf. The forprofit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.

And it’s not like we haven’t tried to remove that parasite.

Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all proposed and tried to bring a national healthcare system to the United States.

They all failed, and when I did a deep dive into the topic last year for my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare, I found two major barriers to removing that tick from our backs.

The early opposition, more than 100 years ago, to a national healthcare system came from southern white congressmen (they were all men) and senators who didn’t want even the possibility that Black people could benefit, health-wise, from white people’s tax dollars. (This thinking apparently still motivates many white southern politicians.)

The leader of that healthcare-opposition movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a German immigrant named Frederick Hoffman. Hoffman was a senior executive for the Prudential Insurance Company, and wrote several books about the racial inferiority of Black people, a topic he traveled the country lecturing about.

His most well-known book was titled Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. It became a major best-seller across America when it was first published for the American Economic Association by the Macmillan Company in 1896, the same year the Supreme Court’s Plessy v Ferguson decision legally turned the entire U.S. into an apartheid state.

Hoffman taught that Black people, in the absence of slavery, were so physically and intellectually inferior to whites that if they were simply deprived of healthcare the entire race would die out in a few generations. Denying healthcare to Black people, he said, would “solve the race problem in America.”

By the 1920s, the insurance company he was a vice president of was moving from life insurance into the health insurance field, which brought an added incentive to lobby hard against any sort of a national healthcare plan.

Which brings us to the second reason America has no national healthcare system: profits.

“Dollar” Bill McGuire, a recent CEO of America’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth, made about $1.5 billion dollars during his time with that company. To avoid prosecution in 2007, he had to cough up $468 million, but still walked away a billionaire. Stephen J Hemsley, his successor, made off with around half a billion.

Much of that money, and the pay for the multiple senior executives at that and other insurance companies who make over $1 million a year, came from saying “No!” to people who file claims for payment of their healthcare costs.

This became so painful for Cigna Vice President Wendell Potter that he resigned in disgust after a teenager he knew was denied payment for a transplant and died. He then wrote a brilliant book about his experience in the industry: Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans.

In the 2020 election there were quite a few issues on statewide ballots around the country. Only three of them outpolled Joe Biden’s win, and expanding Medicaid to cover everybody was at the top of that list. (The other two were raising the minimum wage and legalizing pot.)

The last successful effort to provide government funded, single-payer healthcare insurance was when Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare and Medicaid (both single-payer systems) in the 1960s. It was a heck of an effort, but the health insurance industry was then a tiny fraction of its current size.

Medicare For All, like Canada has, would save American families thousands every year immediately and do away with the 500,000+ annual bankruptcies in this country that happen only because somebody in the family got sick.

But it would kill the billions every week in profits of the half-dozen corporate giants that dominate the health insurance industry.

The COVID-19 crisis — which produced an explosion in healthcare debt for American families (but not for those in any other developed nation) — is starting to create considerable pressure for change, but Americans still must overcome the political corruption the Supreme Court wrote into our system with Citizens United.

It’ll be a big lift: keep it on your radar. And if you’d like to let your members of the House and Senate know that you stand with Bernie and in opposition to the GOP, the number for the congressional switchboard, which can connect you to any member, is (202)-224-3121.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the

author of The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream (2020);

The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America (2019); and more than 25 other

books in print.