Would Medicare-For-All be the Answer for our Health Care System?

OK, OK, enough with the "we must defend the Affordable Care Act, (Obama Care), Nobody I know ever wanted this without a public option anyway but somehow we are all being named as the loyal masses that the dirty Republicans are fucking over by attacking it.  I will editorialize no further and let Dr. Geyman speak for himself.  Keep in mind this article is from January 2013, before Trump, before the Republican congress, even before 2014 when most of ACA went into effect, but just check out his predictions of system failures that have indeed all come to pass and worse.

      Dr. Geyman predicts that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) “will fail to control costs or prices, will not provide universal access to care, and at best will provide low value, high premium “insurance” that will still make essential health care unaffordable for many millions of patients and families.”
     According to Dr. Geyman, “The ACA’s fundamental flaw is that it props up an inefficient and exploitative private health insurance industry while not recognizing that deregulated markets can’t fix systemic problems of access, costs, quality, equity, accountability and sustainability.” In Dr. Geyman’s view, this flows from the political fact that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was “crafted in large part by corporate stakeholders who are themselves responsible for the high costs of U.S. health care. More

Dr Greyman is obviously a hardened advocate for Medicare for all and has written extensively for many years, is past president of Physician for a National Health Plan and all having been working on this issue since 1987.  30 years -- my god that is ancient history, and for that 30 years the insurance industry has done exactly what I predicted in 1994 when California single payer, prop 186 was defeated in a high priced campaign of lies -- they would sucked the life blood out of the health care system until we had to nationalize it dead and rotting corpse. And, you know what?  It is by all rights indeed nearly dead.  Oops, I digress, editorializing and I said I wouldn't.



The following is from a recent article An American Tragedy: Healthcare for Profit which reviews Dr. Geyman's new book Crisis in US Health Care: Corporate Power vs The Common Good (Copernicus Healthcare which tracks 60 years of for profit American health care.  It is an indispensable history especially at this time when truth telling is in such short supply all around.

      Here are some statistics about the US’s ruinous system of health care that you’ll find appalling, though probably not surprising. Page numbers come from the book I’m reviewing here:

• The combined annual cost of insurance and health care is $25,000 for a family of four, while one year’s worth of cancer drugs exceeds $200,000, forcing patients to choose between bankruptcy and treatment. [262]
• Health care makes up a seventh of America’s national income, despite which, 50,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance, according to findings in 2012 by Harvard researchers and the US Census Bureau. [98]
• Tens of millions of uninsured or underinsured Americans include “5.9 million uninsured mothers, one in five of whom are likely to have the greatest physical and mental health care needs.” The “underinsured” are 31 million people who have insurance but can’t get care when they need it. Even the insured get “surprise bills for services they thought would be covered.” [261]
• In 2014 over a half-million Americans paid more than $50,000 each for medicine, up by 63% from 2013, having been prescribed high-cost “specialty” drugs. [81] In that year the cost for a bottle of 500 tablets of the common antibiotic Doxycycline, soared from $20 to $1849 in just six months. [80] The contrast with other countries is immense; Herceptin, a breast cancer drug, costs 30 percent less in England and 28 percent less in Norway than it does in the US. [81]
• Costs vary from region to region and even from hospital to hospital. In California, an uncomplicated Caesarian section ranges from $8,312 to $70,908, while in the early 1960s it cost $300 and included pre- and post-natal care. [79]

These statistics are drawn from Dr. John Geyman’s Crisis in US Health Care: Corporate Power vs The Common Good. A founding member of Physicians for a National Health Plan, Geyman charts “60 years of ‘enormous changes,’ 1956-2016,” the period of his primary care practice in rural and urban regions. A former conservative who turned progressive as he learned about America’s health-care enormities, Geyman says our health care predicament is rooted in “a confrontation between profit-seeking corporate stakeholders and the common good,” and while he doesn’t use the c-word, the book is a thoroughly convincing indictment of capitalism in its effects on our nation’s health.”

Both of these below are from 2013
Would Medicare-For-All be the Answer for our Health Care System? | HelpingYouCare®:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-geyman/the-affordable-care-act_b_2537411.html