How ironic will it be when health insurance companies that have been skimming billions off the top to pad CEO salaries, shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, fund elaborate ad campaigns and shell out dividends to prop up stock prices, start declaring bankruptcy as millions of Americans suffer through COVID-19 and its after-effects – or, richer yet, plead for a bailout from U.S. taxpayers?
More than 130,000 Americans have lost their lives already to COVID-19 and at this rate, some 200,000 are expected to die by October, but let’s not worry about them. They’re gone, no longer a burden on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or the crumbling health- care system. Well, maybe their outstanding bills will be a burden on their families, but that’s a matter for the courts.
Nearly 3 million Americans have already become infected with COVID (though now the CDC is estimating the actual number at 10 times that, or 30 million), and it’s only July. It’s a milestone completely ignored by Trump and his Republican comrades, who want people to think the crisis has magically disappeared, just as Trump said it would, in service of all-mighty Wall Street, even as numbers surge in Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, Arizona and more than two dozen states. With as many as 57,000 new cases a day, the latest Trumpian brainwashing is that Americans will become numb to the death and disease and will just “get used to it.”
But what happens when those hundreds of thousands who have had to be hospitalized or waited the sickness out at home, get their medical bills? And what about ongoing health problems that might result from scarred lungs or damaged organs?
If Trump, obsessive about overturning Obamacare and its protection against “pre-existing conditions,” is successful, insurance companies will again be unleashed to either price people out of the market or refuse coverage altogether. What will happen to these people then? And what of the 20 million Americans who have lost their jobs, their income, and with it their employer-subsidized health insurance.
COVID has peeled the Band-aid off to expose just how sick our for-profit health care system is, as demonstrated by the fact that thousands of health-care workers have had to be furloughed, even as hospitals struggle to keep up with the influx of patients into overcrowded, overtaxed ICUs and ERs. Why? Because they had to shut down lucrative “nonessential” procedures. Even before the coronavirus pandemic (which made medical service akin to being a foot soldier on the frontline of war, as the death toll has now exceeded Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan), a shortage of 154,000 doctors was projected by 2030.
Similarly, Big Pharma, which gets humongous taxpayer-funded investments to develop drugs and vaccines, doesn’t bother developing treatments unless the disease is lucrative enough – and that includes vaccines to eradicate a disease because they find the medications for ongoing illness (like cancer, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year), so much more profitable.
Indeed, health care is Big Business, accounting for one-sixth of the entire GDP (and likely to go up to 20 percent). Each person spends $11,000, yet America’s health-care system, though the most costly in the world, is actually not “exceptional” as Trump and his ilk keep insisting. Our outcomes are just above Third World countries and for several years now, average lifespans have actually been falling.
Access to care is a big issue (some solutions: telemedicine, opening clinics, forgiving loans of doctors, nurses, physicians assistants who work for a period of time in under-served areas; creating new specialties of nursing and physicians assistant who can treat).
So is affordability. Unaffordable medical bills cause 500,000 bankruptcies a year. People are afraid to have an ailment checked out early, when it can best be contained because of concern of out-of-pocket expenses. Solution: the health-care industry, including doctors, hospitals and Big Pharma, need to have costs rationalized much as public utilities do, and for-profit insurance-company middlemen, which adds 30 percent to health-care costs, should be eliminated altogether).
And with the advancement of treatments that basically can save the lives of people (who can afford them) to the point where there would not be the supply for the demand, there needs to be new prioritization on wellness – which is counterproductive to a for-profit health care system.
But as the number of people sickened by COVID-19 hits 3 million (and counting and counting and counting), it becomes painfully clear that even as 100-year floods are coming every few years, the novel coronavirus pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon, and another new novel pandemic may be just around a corner.
The pandemic has shown the vulnerabilities, the inadequacies and the injustice of a purely capitalistic, for-profit model of health care. The premise is at its heart flawed: if capitalism is supply and demand, how much is your child’s life worth? $10 million? $20 million? And we saw the effectiveness of the alternative in New York, with Gov. Andrew Cuomo declaring the equivalent of martial law to serve hospitals, personnel and supplies where needed.
But Trump, a bully who gets a rush from inflicting cruelty, realizes that controlling access to health care is literally control of people – life and death. You control their finances, their resources, their anxiety, their terror, their sense of security. People who are struggling with illness, who are suffering in pain, who are frantic for their children, their parents, their spouse, who have to fight insurance companies and creditors and plead with Big Pharma for life-saving drugs, can’t be politically active, don’t even have the ability to quit an abusive employer or start their own business.
The coronavirus pandemic has not only demonstrated why public health and universal health care are critical to a healthy society and a productive economy, but in the wreckage is creating the necessity and opportunity to build a better, more rational health care system – or at least catch up to the rest of the developed world.
