What is it going to take for Americans to get behind a single-payer healthcare system?
How many of your friends and neighbors need to go broke? How many babies need to die needlessly? How many mothers need to suffer and die? How many people have to lose everything over fairly common ailments? How many hospitals need to close?
This is getting absurd.
Never in all my life have I encountered a situation even remotely similar to the American healthcare system and our relationship with it.
We hate it.
All of us hate it with a red hot passion.
And why wouldn’t we hate it? We pay unbelievably more for our care than literally everyone else who doesn’t reside in this country, and all of those people receive better care and better outcomes and have healthier populations. Of course we hate it.
We hate the insurance companies. We hate the hospitals. We hate the nickel-and-dime pettiness of the overly complicated billing process. We hate the cost of it all. We hate the treatment we often receive when we are forced to go to the doctor, or, God help us, the hospital.
We hate it and hate it and hate it ….
Until someone tries to change it.
And then, for some unknown reason, half of the country fights tooth and nail to save it while pretending that anyone trying to change it is a socialist who wants to kill elderly people.
It’s the nuttiest thing I’ve ever encountered.
In fact, it’s how we ended up with Obamacare—a system that even the program’s namesake didn’t want. President Obama wanted a single-payer system. He wanted something on par with the system that serves Canada and several other developed nations around the globe.
Those nations pay significantly less for care. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Americans pay just under $14,000 per year for care. The average among 23 other peer nations is less than $7,400 annually.
Americans pay more for literally everything: outpatient care, inpatient care, surgeries, routine visits, dental care, vision care and, of course, prescription drugs.
But surely we get better results, right?
Nope.
People in those other 23 countries live longer, have fewer ailments, experience roughly similar wait times for routine treatments and minor surgeries and typically less wait time for emergency care and emergency surgeries.
And, oh, by the way, not a single person in most of those 23 countries experienced a personal bankruptcy due directly to the cost of medical treatment. The U.S. averages more than 500,000 every single year.
But when Obama and Democrats pushed for a single-payer system that would cost less and provide better outcomes, they were met with a full scale freakout from the right. Republicans refused to budge on the issue and blocked every attempt to push through a significant overhaul.
So, Obama pivoted the Affordable Care Act—a Republican-created plan that was essentially a gift to insurance companies and major corporations who could cut the amounts they paid for their employees’ healthcare coverage while blaming the cuts on that dadgum Obamacare.
It has been far more expensive than it ever should have been, thanks to the unchecked greed of corporate America and the Republican Party. But even still, according to another study by Kaiser, Obamacare has saved Americans more than $700 billion and will cut more than $2 trillion off the costs by 2033.
If you want to understand how that could be, just look at Alabama, where life is as close to what it was pre-Obamacare as anywhere in America. We stupidly (and cruelly) refused to expand Medicaid, pretending we couldn’t afford it while building a $2 billion prison, and we’ve also cut every corner imaginable and failed to lift a finger to help struggling people at every turn.
How’s it going for us?
We’ve lost 14 hospitals in the years since Obamacare was passed and now have wide, wide swaths of the state lacking basic emergency care. In some cases, a pregnant woman must travel more than 100 miles to deliver a baby in a hospital that has a delivery room. In 2024, 25 counties in this 67-county state didn’t have a pediatrician.
I won’t bore you with our rankings in various categories, because they’re exactly what you think they’d be: We’d have to improve significantly to be considered bad.
And this—Alabama’s healthcare reality—is what national Republicans want for everyone. A system in which the wealthy have Cadillac healthcare plans and access to world class care while the workers and poor push through common ailments because their high-deductible plans are too expensive, or they go into bankruptcy because they were forced to seek catastrophic care for ailments that went too long untreated.
This is the reality we are facing.
In a few days, those Obamacare subsidies are going to expire. The Trump administration made sure they died because they needed that money to give billionaires a tax break on their private jets. When the subsidies die, millions will lose their health care.
They’ll still get sick and still need care and still go to the hospital. The costs will start to rise again. They will become even more unaffordable than they currently are.
And America will continue to be mostly sick and tired of it, but too brainwashed to fix it.
