“Healthcare – America Taken Hostage” Oct. 20, 2019 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
“…Gilens took about 1,700 policy decisions, and compared them with public attitudes, and closely correlated with corporate interests. Elsewhere he showed that about 70 percent of the population has no influence on policy – they might as well be in some other country. And as you go up the income and wealth level, the impact on public policy is greater – the rich essentially get what they want.”
- Noam Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream, p. 139
I doubt seriously that I need to mount this apologetic for anyone here but for any more traditional religious folks who may catch this message on-line, let me make this distinction: politics is about political parties, candidates, and elections. Religion is about ethics, values, character, and primarily, compassion. Faith communities, as a part of society, provide spiritual rituals such as weddings, funerals, baptisms, and other coming of age and rites of passage ceremonies. But a big part of religious tradition is applying ethics, character, and compassion to the institutions of power all around us.
Like when Moses said to Pharaoh, “Let my people go.”
Or when the ancient Hebrew prophets, Elijah, Jeremiah, Amos, Isaiah, Hosea, confronted the rulers and businesses that oppressed the poor.
Or the Buddha, who is said to have abandoned royal station in life to identify with the poor and who taught compassion as a primary spiritual value.
Because sincere religion is always concerned with radical compassion, when the government comes between health care providers and the sick who need healthcare, it becomes sermon material. I would say, in 2019, any priest, pastor, rabbi, or imam who has not been preaching about access to healthcare in the last decade should seriously consider a career as a used car salesman and let someone with a conscience occupy your pulpit.
Either grow a pair or shut up.
Because there are still 44 million people who have no healthcare in America and in spite of lying politicians who talk about how much people love their private insurance, the truth is that almost no one who has ever had to use their insurance likes it at all and right now, while a lot of people say that they don’t want to change to Medicare for all because they think what they have now is better, let me just say that if the premature deaths of 22,000 Americans every year because they don’t have healthcare makes you question your self-centered world view then you should consider yourself on the outside looking in on this conversation because you don’t have enough humanity in your heart to be taken seriously.
Because we know what kind of spiritual leader the world needs now, and you are not it.
So, let me get to the subject at hand: I know this chart will be hard for many of you to read but let me just tell you, that compared to other western democracies, we spend, on average, twice as much per person for healthcare even though we do not provide healthcare to millions of people and hundreds of millions of others who do have health insurance, have deductibles that are so high that they hesitate to use it. England, Australia, Japan, Belgium, Canada, France, all spend less than half of what we spend, they cover everyone, and they have virtually no co-pay or deductibles.
Why is this? Why do we spend twice as much and get so much less than other countries? Please allow me to give you an illustration from my personal life:
My doctor wants me to get an echocardiogram every few years because I have a heart murmur. What do you think that getting that test should cost?
Let me tell you, when my insurance provided non-profit hospital called me to schedule the test, it was going to cost me $1450 out of pocket . . . for a test that I don’t know if I need it or not… it isn’t surgery, it isn’t treatment, it was just a part of a check-up. So, I might elect to skip it but I have access to another doctor who looked up an alternative where I could get the test done in Kansas City for $450. . . less than 1/3 of the cost here in town . . . and that was done by a for-profit practice. So what does it really cost to conduct this test? Maybe a couple of hundred dollars?
Why does healthcare cost more than twice as much in the United States? Because insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare providers have turned being sick into a money-making proposition in which they can turn your money into their money while getting you to vote for the bought and paid for regimes that keep the money spicket turned on.
If America manages to go to a single payer system, whether it is Medicare-for-all or some other iteration of a single payer system, our actual costs will go down by about 50%. That is math. Politics will dictate who pays the remaining costs. If the cost of healthcare is distributed fairly across the economic playing field, lower income people will pay less and higher income people will pay more and that is what has the corporate news media and the oligarchic puppet masters of our economy up in arms.
I was holed up in a Kansas City hotel room after my $450 echocardiogram on Tuesday, watching the democratic debate in which the corporate media and the corporate candidates were trying to force Elizabeth Warren to say that her Medicare-for-all proposal would make middle class taxes go up. The truth is, as I have said from this pulpit before, we would be shifting from paying premiums to insurance companies to paying for healthcare through taxes. And employers who have been paying premiums for employees can stop paying those premiums and give the same amount of money to their employees as salary.
So, costs will go down and they will go down dramatically, but how healthcare is paid for will change and that change may be a complicated debate. But it could be done fairly so that everyone is a winner in the long run.
And I dare say that while many Americans just don’t understand how this would work and why they would benefit, we can be confident that all 12 candidates on the stage Tuesday night do understand the math, the political issues, and the process.
Pete Buttigieg is a veteran, he is a Rhodes scholar, a Harvard graduate and a self-proclaimed evangelical Christian. And yet, he stood on stage and lied like a cheap rug about the costs and benefits of Medicare-for-all. . . currently, Mayor Pete is second only to Donald Trump in political contributions from health insurance and pharmaceutical companies . . . proof that our system of political donations can corrupt even someone we would otherwise really want to like.
Senator Amy Klobuchar bills herself as a pragmatist and calls Medicare-for-all a pipe dream. And it is a pipe dream if you believe that your first priority is to surrender unconditionally to the outrageous and obscene profits pocketed by health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. If, however, you have compassion and want sick people to be able to get healthcare, it isn’t a pipe dream, it is a practical, efficient, and immanently affordable way to do it. You just have to decide if you want to serve the billionaire corporate interests or the interests of the American people and honestly, it isn’t much more complicated than that. I just wish that smart people would stop acting like all voters are as gullible as a pre-school kid being offered candy if they will just get into the van.
Politics is sometimes the art of dividing people against one another so that they can never see who is really controlling their destiny and taking their wallet at the same time. This now famous sign is a perfect example of that. This insulin user is outraged by the amount of money being spent to save heroin addicts from overdoses, but the real problem is not the money spent to save addicts, the real question is why does your insulin cost so much?
If the same vial of insulin costs 90% less in Canada as it does in the United States, your problem is not heroin addicts, your problem is politicians who are addicted to the political donations of pharmaceutical companies. You have every reason to be angry, but you should be angry about who is really robbing you rather than someone who is probably just as much of a victim as you are.
It is difficult to gauge exactly how much public support there is for Medicare-for-all because there are so many lies being told by both Republicans and Democrats about healthcare in order to protect the financial interests of the super wealthy providers but this much I know for sure, 100% of people who are sick want to have access to healthcare and 100% of those people will believe that they ought to be able to get it without going bankrupt and that is the system we do not currently have in this country and I plan to keep talking about it until we do.
Folks, this is what I believe. I believe that peace in the absence of justice is nothing but surrender, and this is no time to surrender our health to corporate profit.
