Predatory Heath "Insurers"

Politics by murder and threat of violence is never appropriate. Once political assassination is normalized all officeholders and candidates both Republicans and Democrats are at risk and democracy cannot function. When democracy cannot function we all suffer. I and the Pickaway County Democratic Party were personally threatened by the Proud Boys who tried to shout me down at a speaking event during my campaign for the Ohio House. Nor should Democrats make light of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, even though Trump joked about the life-threatening hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband.

The recent assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson is what we in healthcare call a "sentinel event". Sentinel events are the canary in the coal mine that alert us to severe and dangerous problems. A patient who dies of a heart attack in the waiting room of an overcrowded ER is one. Also we should take note of the sentinel statistics bearing out that COVID deaths were significantly higher in Republican leaning anti-vaccine counties. I saw a patient the other day who was discharged from the rehabilitative nursing home before he was strong enough and subsequently fell at home fracturing his hip. His Medicare Advantage profit-based health insurance plan, through its algorithms, had decided he had had enough rehab time, overriding the pleas of his physician and family. The health insurance plans' profits were protected. My patient suffered. This is one story. One sentinel event. I could tell you thousands.

Brian Thompson's United Healthcare denied 32% of all submitted claims. This is twice the national average. Albeit the national average is still far too high. Translate that 32% statistic into the immense amount of human suffering undergone by my patient with the broken hip, or the 60% of all bankruptcies in America as a direct result of medical bills. What a perverse system! Health insurers take our money, then refuse care. Your need for care is a threat to health insurer profit margins.

Of the advanced nations in the world, the US is the ONLY nation that treats healthcare as a business opportunity, rather than a human right- thus we spend twice as much as other nations for bottom ranked results. The Commonwealth international healthcare system comparison studies looking at care in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand confirm in study after study after study that we spend twice as much for the worst care. The US is dead last in fairness, equity, affordability, access and highest in numbers of persons who go without care, medicines or treatments. In healthcare, business is not the solution, business is the problem.

A Facebook meme says "If you are not outraged then you are not paying attention". To really look into the face of our profit-seeking patient-destroying monster of a healthcare system is to look into the face of the mythical Medusa. It is so ugly that one can be driven to murder, as was Mr. Thompson's assailant or, emotionally damaged, " turned to stone" as it were. Many physicians and nurses suffer from "moral injury', sustained from working in a system that values profit over care. I recommend Dr. Wendy Dean's book " If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It's So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First" For many physicians and nurses , myself included we are driven to protect our patients through proven effective improved and expanded, compassionate and COST-EFFECTIVE Medicare for All.

I close with several instructive quotes and advice to Democrats:

Martin Luther King: "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane"

Marcia Angell, MD, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine: "We've engaged in a massive and failed experiment in market-based medicine in the US. Rhetoric about the benefits of competition and profit-driven health care can no longer hide the reality: Our health system is in shambles."

Economist Gerald Friedman on his analysis of Ohio's Medicare for All pending legislation: "The question then is not whether Ohio can afford single payer [Medicare for All] because a single-payer is cheaper than continuing with the status quo. Rather the question is whether the people of Ohio can continue to pay for an inefficient and wasteful health care system that often fails to care for them. They can certainly afford one that is more effective and less profligate with their money."

Poet and social justice advocate Wendell Berry: "Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy."

A note to Democrats: MAGA economic anger is justified. Democrats can honor our decades of looking out for working persons by supporting Medicare for All. Republicans can continue to give tax cuts to health insurers and their CEOs while trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with phantasmic "concepts of a plan", while health insurers and Big Pharma bleed us till we die. The time to get rid of health insurers and replace them with improved and expanded, compassionate and cost-effective Medicare for All is NOW!