Let’s do it!
How will we pay for Bernie Sander’s “Medicare for All”? I can’t believe anyone with even a basic knowledge of American health care realities could ask such a question.
Our present fee-for-service health care system is by far the world’s most complicated and expensive. Our costs are almost twice those of France, presently in second place in health care costs. Yet we rank an embarrassing 36th in overall health care quality, mostly based on our low availability and response ratings. These high costs originate from several glaring irregularities that would be eliminated or remedied by a unified federallyadministered health care system.
First is the ridiculously high cost of our private health insurance, by far the world’s most expensive. These bloated figures are mostly due to high administrative costs expended in trying to shift legitimate charges to some other agency or to avoid paying them altogether. Administrative costs make up about 30 percent of the total American private health insurance budget. Like our total health care itself, it’s by far the world’s highest.
We pay two to four times more for prescription medications than the rest of the world. Americans can go across the Canadian or Mexican border and buy the same drugs made by the same manufacturer in the same boxes or bottles for about a third or less of what they would pay in the U. S. The drug industry, known collectively as “Big Pharma,” tells us these higher domestic charges are necessary to cover the costs of research and development. Horsefeathers! The U.S. government pays millions each year for pharmaceutical R&D. And a large part of this is conducted in the research laboratories of our tax supported state universities. And while we are enumerating the many sins of Big Pharma there is another equally onerous rip-off about which few seem aware.
An amendment, attachment or “rider” to another law has been sneaked through Congress when we weren’t looking which prevents the Veterans Administration, probably the largest purchaser, and other large government agencies from negotiating better prices with the pharmaceutical industry based on volume purchasing like any other large customer routinely does. It’s a standard business practice.
We are being systematically hoodwinked by the vast, too complicated medical industry and the guys and gals we send to Washington to look out for our welfare and interests. But what are we going to do about it? Even though most of us are fully aware that these boughtand-paid-for bozos are serving the fat cats and only giving us lip service, for some strange reason we keep sending 90 percent of them back to Washington every two years. What’s going on here?
I know, I know. Trump’s an incompetent crook but he is against abortion and that’s all that should count with true Christians, right? But the Supreme Court now has a right-wing majority and in the next appeal cases that come up, Roe v Wade will be systematically dismembered. I personally have mixed feelings about that, but I am dead sure it is past time that we took our country back.
Georgia and Florida are the only two Deep South states with a chance of being restored to sanity this November. Remember; when you go into that voting booth no one but God and your conscience know which levers you pull. Let’s do it, Georgia!
George B. Reed Jr., who lives in Rossville, can be reached by email at reed1600@ bellsouth.net.