In the summer of 2014, when the Obamacare issue became its most strident, Mark Halperin–Senior Political Analyst for Time magazine–chided Obama for not being truthful about how costs are going to be controlled. In an appearance on Morning Joe he even said death panels do exist and that they are needed to “bend the cost curve on end-of-life care”.
Later, I watched the entire 13 minutes of Halperin’s appearance on Maltzberg’s show. He didn’t seem “mad” at all–as several Right-Wing pundits claimed–though he did say the President had been misleading in his statements about keeping one’s health insurance policy if one wanted to. That was disturbing.
Later still, we found out that many substandard insurance plans–hardly worth the paper they were printed on–were being cancelled by the insurance companies themselves, but that was because they didn’t meet basic requirements under the new law.
As far as death panels are concerned, Halperin said that insurance companies were already making such end-of-life decisions, for cost control. This, of course, has occurred for some time–though the general public, I believe, has been largely unaware. Perhaps the unpleasantness of such decision-making and of the situations attending it led them to look away. My point here is that if one wants to blame someone for “death panels”, one should have started with the health insurance companies several decades ago.
This “death panel” idea is a logical consequence of conspiracy theories concerning world overpopulation and the donations of high-profile billionaires like Warren Buffet to Planned Parenthood and this supposed new healthcare policy designed to limit treatment at the end of life. The goal, conspiracists say, is to achieve zero population growth and eventually depopulate the planet, after the collapse of the major world economies. Individual freedom and prosperity will then be replaced with a “collectivist tyranny” that decides how much consumers are allowed to consume.
One could just as easily blame Capitalism and the Law of Supply and Demand for these limitations placed on medical treatment at the end of life. Supply of treatment is limited (Law of Conservation of Resources) and demand is steadily increasing, both of which drive up costs to the consumer. Capitalism itself decides that the wealthy get to consume more medical treatment–and the poor less. So the Right’s touting of a “War on Humanity” is more accurately a “War on the Poor”. How can one doubt that the wealthy get more and better end-of-life treatment? For the entire history of our republic, instead of “survival of the fittest” we have endured “survival of the richest”.
The insertion of health insurance companies into this equation–like the mob thugs who sell protection from harm or unforeseen calamity in their neighborhoods–means that whoever has the best insurance gets to consume the best care. Insurance companies, of course, in order to limit their own costs and maximize profit, have to make decisions concerning how much treatment a particular consumer gets at the end of her or his life. These are the “death panels” that so many naively think have sprung up because of Obamacare, but have actually been in existence for decades, at least. One needs only to speak with a friend who has dealt with an insurance company making such decisions about the survival of an elderly loved one.
Obamacare is an attempt–albeit a relatively weak one– to change this equation by forcing the insurance mob to accept less payout from lower-income people for their “protection”, with the promise that getting more of these people into the system will increase their overall profit. But the pattern of yearly record profits for health-insurance companies has supposedly dictated the “need” for substantial increases in premiums, which we are seeing now, in 2016.
Stats show that the United States consistently exhibits the highest per-capita cost for health care on this planet, yet ranks far down the list, in varying positions over the years, for the quality of that care. Data also seems to show that the opposite is true in several northern European countries, whose citizens seem to support their nationalized systems, though this inference seems not to have taken hold widely in this nation, except among some younger people, especially Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Sanders’ presidential campaign thrives, in part, because of his proposal to eliminate health insurance companies altogether and move to a single-payer government-run system.
Many of us believe that the savings in total healthcare costs alone makes this proposal viable. The questions then become: Do we trust the federal bureaucracy to fairly and effectively administer such a system? Do we need the competition between healthcare insurance companies as well as between healthcare providers and medical-pharmaceutical suppliers in order to ensure the best care possible?
duckworthsam 