You Already Concluded The Coronavirus Proves Our Healthcare System Is Totally Broken?– Here Are Two More Stories That Make Ultra-clear Our Private Insurance Company-based Healthcare System Is Wack

The first time I wrote about the Covid-19 virus I wrote:

Covid-19 could not be a more perfect and obvious “my health is your health/your health is my health” argument for Medicare for all.  With massive, nationwide layoffs because of the Covid-19 health crisis, millions of Americans are now losing their “if you like your private employer health plan, you can keep it,” health insurance right at the time when they need it most.

I thought it was pretty obvious that our private insurance company-based healthcare system is broken when I wrote that.  But now there are two more stories that totally torpedo the idea that a private insurance company-based healthcare system makes any sense at all.  The two stories must be treated as related in a sisterly way, but it is not clear that everybody is making the connections that need to be made.

One story is that the coronavirus crisis is actually driving up the profits for Healthcare insurers because, as a result of the health crisis, the demand for nonessential medical treatment that the insurance companies have to pay for has plummeted.  In other words, even as there is a need to channel extra resources in the direction of dealing with the virus, the health insurers get to pocket a windfall because, overall, the entire community of patients is currently getting less to address its health care needs.  Even crazier, at the same time health insurance companies are getting to pocket the windfall from these healthcare crisis vicissitudes, hospitals, extra burdened by Covid, are facing financial failure as they shutdown other activities and patient treatments they depend on for their financial equilibrium.

Here is what Democracy Now reported last Friday, as part of its headlines respecting healthcare insurer profits (probably picking it up from Common Dreams the day before):

The for-profit health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group reported profits grew by over $160 million during the first quarter of 2020, as demand for nonessential medical treatment plummeted while coronavirus hospitalizations surged. UnitedHealth reported a 3.4% year-over-year increase in quarterly earnings to $5 billion. Former health insurance executive Wendell Potter tweeted in response, “The earnings were so good, the company said it still expects to make as much in total profits this year as they predicted in December … when no one could predict the massive loss of life & jobs caused by the coronavirus. In other words, they’re thriving during a pandemic.”

But it gets worse!  Vice News is reporting that Democrats are planning to address the Covid-19 crisis by plowing more money into premiums that will go to the insurance companies.  (See: Democrats’ Big Coronavirus Idea Is to Subsidize Health Insurers- Instead of pushing for public health solutions, Democrats want to cover COBRA premiums.)  In other words, Democrats are going to direct Covid-19 `solution money' to where the problem doesn’t exist and where that money can be intercepted and siphoned off as more insurance company profit windfall.  By definition, insurance is a game of chance, so that premiums paying for insurance are, as a matter of high probability, paid for people who are likely not sick and not needing treatment. .   And these days, as noted, those people are probably trying to minimize the medical treatments they are getting that the insurance companies could be expected to pay for.

Healthcare planing is one of things I studied back in the 70s to get my Masters of Urban Planning degree.  Maybe I didn’t get into it deeply enough at the time, but I certainly don’t remember anything in my studies pointing out that we could have a system this insane.

Certainly it’s clear that our private insurance company-based healthcare system is broken and that the solution is some kind of universal healthcare, something along the lines of Medicare for all as was championed by Bernie Sanders. .   But as a good indication that another system is broken, our political system, I had to point out the last time I wrote about the coronavirus that, all of this notwithstanding, Joe Biden stated very recently that if the Democrats pass Medicare for all he will veto it if he is elected president.

Reflections On What It Means To Be Retreating More Into Virtual Existence In Fear Of A Virus

This is not intended to provide any sort of conclusion as to where to draw the line about appropriate cautions to take as we make our individual and collective decisions about dealing with Covid-19.  Still, I feel it’s essential to reflect on certain things as we adopt unfamiliar, new and unnatural ways of living and societally interacting.

As we are increasingly prompted to convert all our social and interpersonal dealings into a virtual, through-the-internet verisimilitude replication of the lives that we used to lead, some kind of existence that is ethereally Matrix-like, it is important to remember how the internet was built for data-scraping and surveillance.  Amazon, with its strange history and ties to the U.S. Military and intelligence communities, already knows far too much about everyone already, and our encouraged wholesale retreat into manifesting our interactions in exclusively digitally ways will only be making the big internet monopolies more formidably ginormous and powerful.  A lot of us now find ourselves on Zoom conferencing discovering its merits as one of the prime candidates for virtual meeting options– Zoom sends your data to Facebook even if you don't have a Facebook account–  And Facebook has a record of coordinating, Big Brother style, with groups like the Atlantic Council and Cambridge Analytica that affected the 2016 election.  Let’s also remember that internet technology, knowing what it knows about us as it collects information about us for that purpose, can manipulate us as well.  It is routinely hired out to do so.

Heretofore, some of the antidote for the control of control and ubiquity of the internet was to take a break and go where the internet’s reach and influence might peter out: Have face-to-face, peer-to-peer personal interactions, read physical vs. digital books, assemble together in real meetings, assemblies and forums, listen to and support the kind of live radio that the internet cannot squelch, censor or take away.  It is part of the reason that I, as a co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries have been fighting for the continuation of traditional libraries with physical books and trained human being librarians. . .  It is part of the reason I support WBAI radio, 99.5 FM, the Pacifica station in New York that is New York City's only truly listener supported public radio station.

. . . You may have noticed that a spin-off of the coronaviris effects has been the closure of most libraries.  We would hope that this is not subsequently cited as additional evidence that this public commons is a public asset society can now dispense with.  Meanwhile, the public’s habits of hanging out in the shallower digital internet world will, perforce, be reinforced as we live protecting ourselves from the virus.

. . . With the emphasis on digital substitution you may not have noticed that lock downs and new rules against groups of more than a certain number of people gathering, for instance restricting groups to no more than ten, leaves by the wayside the First Amendment right of assembly guaranteed by the Constitution.  Why was the right of public assembly one of the first enumerated rights?  Seasoned activists are well acquainted with the fact that when opposing war, or agitating for rights including, for instance, healthcare, the clicking of Facebook posts to like them or even generating acerbically astute and insightful Tweets, just doesn’t cut it and hardly equals the impact of crowds getting out into the streets.

We are also in the middle of a national election.  I recently joked (before some of the new really strict new controls) that those in power were coming up with a prohibition on future Bernie Sanders’s rallies, but that they weren’t bothering with an equivalent rule for Joe Biden rallies because Biden doesn’t draw any crowds.  Is there a virtual substitute for the formidably energetic Bernie troops knocking on doors; something they will not now be able to do?  Telephone calls are not the same as face-to-face knocking on doors.

Nothing is the same as face-to-face and knocking on doors because human beings were not built for virtual existences.  We are social animals designed for the social bonds that come from real interactions.  When we are infants, the mother holding the child generates the hormone oxytocin, which promotes the bond between the mother and child.  Same thing when a father holds the baby.  It is a physical thing.  The same hormones are generated when owners pet their pets, in both the pet owner and the pet.

Oxytocin from human closeness not only generates, builds and strengthens the bonds between human beings, it actually confers benefits like building up the immune system, calming us, and making us more capable.  It is ironic that, as we go into isolation to avoid getting sick with the coronavirus, we may actually, through our isolation and physical separation, be weakening our immune system’s ability to respond to and for us to survive the virus if we get infected. . .  Thinking about how important human physical touch is, holding a hand, giving and receiving a hug, I feel, in depth and achingly for the afflicted patients who must recover separated and physically apart from their loved ones.

When email took over as the new default method of communication, the phenomenon of “flaming” was widely recognized as an unfortunate byproduct. Email communications, and some internet communications can be launched instantaneously with the press of a button.  It’s not like a letter that sits around to be mailed the next day when more sober instincts might prevail.  With the disinhibition of not dealing with another person face to face, communications can be extra harsh, especially if exchanges back and forth escalate into a “flame war.”  Even face-to-face communication can be hard; you have to realize and know what you want to say; you have to say what you actually mean; other people have to hear what you actually say and they have to understand, without misinterpretation or incorrect filled-in suppositions, what you actually mean.  All of these things are harder over the internet without all the moment-to-moment micro-adjustments you can make speaking to somebody face to face as you intuitively sense from another’s physical body in the room responding, the ongoing success as opposed to misdirection of your communication.

Added to this is the way that our ongoing fear-based enforced physical separation from others can enhance our suspicions of others.  We walk through the streets now socially distancing each other and maintaining six-feet gaps like wary gunslingers in a Hollywood western.  Fear turns on our lizard brains, and these distances can enhance the instincts toward unhealthy “othering.” This comes just at a time when the obvious solution to get through our current crisis is more community cross-support for resilience.  Covid-19 could not be a more perfect and obvious “my health is your health/your health is my health” argument for Medicare for all.  With massive, nationwide layoffs because of the Covid-19 health crisis, millions of Americans are now losing their “if you like your private employer health plan, you can keep it,” health insurance right at the time when they need it most.  This is notwithstanding Joe Biden’s very recent statement that if the Democrats pass Medicare for all he will veto it if he is elected president. . .

In many ways, Americans are now in a particularly vulnerable time if anyone wants to deploy the typical kind of divide and conquer tactics that neutralize the public’s ability to organize for common goals and make our democracy work.  One of the most valuable big picture overviews available right now about the way things stand is Naomi Klein's Intercept video about the fork in the road decisions ahead of us as we face the Coronavirus crisis (Coronavirus Capitalism — and How to Beat It): Either we could go the route of improving and making our society more resilient the way FDR did in dealing with the Depression of the 1930s, or, instead, another round of disaster capitalism maneuvers could be effected.  We know that the 2008 financial crisis was mishandled by pumping money into wealthy investment funds, banks, and corporations at exactly the time that asset prices were low and temporarily suppressed, prices for things like the homes of people in the Main Street economy, and those assets and homes were then bought up by those hedge funds, banks and corporations. . .  It was one of the greatest wealth transfers ever, increasing wealth inequality in America.  Plus it was paid for with taxpayer money.  The people who lost their homes paid the taxes that financed those tilted economy buy ups that deprived them of ownership.

It's exceedingly hard to maintain a big picture consciousness when news about the virus is frenetically reported with rotating reports of the very latest statistics in different countries, different cities, different regions of different countries, the world, and then starting over again at the beginning for updates because by the time the end of the list is reached, the numbers have already up-ticked.  Alternatively, a fairly good big picture overview doesn't require drowning in the latest moment to moment statistical data: our health care system is at the point of being overwhelmed, the United States is in many ways inexcusably ill prepared for such a pandemic; and, additionally, we are not doing many of the sensible things we could be doing, and yes. . .  people should be cautious  One day, a time may come when we look back at 2020 and say, "that was a very peculiar election–how do that ever happen?"; and if, as we might  hope, the virus finally exits center stage and exact memories of it recede just the way we now have to work to remind ourselves of the 1918 flu (which occurred during the Midterm elections of President Woodrow Wilson's wartime presidential tenure), we may answer: "Oh, that's right, that was during the coronavirus crisis when we were so all distracted and worried about other things."

The coronavirus crisis feels a lot like the 2008 financial crisis and 9/11 wrapped up into one.  It is worth remembering how with the distractions of 9/11 (and the tag-team Anthrax attacks that closely followed), we, as a nation, just as with the 2008 financial crisis, also made a series of really bad decisions as we were distracted from big picture truths.

There are silver linings to our new world.  Families where parents are now working at home are spending more time together, building stronger bonds.  They are experiencing the opposite effect of the separation and isolation that is making our larger world feel so relentlessly dystopian these days.  Some may even experience the new quieting down as meditative, and it may feel as if there is also some shift away from things materialistic.  We may feel closer to some essential truths about what is truly valuable.  That is not to say that all family groups have equal tools to deal with what could feel like a pressure cooker of forced togetherness.

Not everybody has a family that they live with, and that can be unfortunate.  For many their sense ongoing family and human togetherness was achieved by getting out in the world and physically spending time communing with other people.  The virtual is an inferior substitute: Before the virus ever arrived, it has been noted how often people who spend a great deal of their time on platforms like Facebook for their companionship and for their “friends” can wind up depressed.

One last good thing to note is that it does seem that we are, for the most part, presently being good to each other despite the human separations being forced on us and the digital substitutions being offered for our existence.  Hopefully, still being good to each other, we will all be communally together again, in a real physical sense, soon.

A Supermajority of Americans Want Medicare For All: Why Then Does The New York Times Have A Chart Showing A Minority Of Democratic Candidates (7 out of 19, just 37%) Support Medicare For All?— Plus Why Would The Times Deceptively Interpret What That Means?

New York Times bubble head chart showing how Democratic candidates for president who favor Medicare for all are significantly outnumbered by those who don't.-  Why?

Priming its readers for the week’s upcoming Democratic candidates presidential debates, the Times Published a chart that visually emphasized how unpopular “Medicare for all” is with candidates the Democratic party is fielding to run for the United States Presidency.  It showed names and bubble head pics of 19 candidates, segregating off into a minority, seven of the candidates, just 37% of them as favoring Medicare for all.

How could this be when a supermajority of the American public want Medicare for all?  Why would the candidates of the theoretically more liberal party of our duopoly not be willing to fall in line with the polls to obtain the nomination of the Democratic party? . .

 . . . It would even be a winning position to take to win the race for the U.S. presidency against a Republican.  There are polls that say a majority of Republicans, 52%, favor Medicare for all.  And even though Fox News itself may not like it, the Fox News audience seems to love the idea of Medicare for all.    

How did the New York Times seek to explain the fact that so many Democratic candidates were not willing to follow the polls and to say that they would give the public what they want in this respect?  The Times made it seem like Medicare for all is controversially divisive: “the concept is dividing the 2020 field.”– With only a 37% minority of the candidates shown as favoring Medicare for all that lopsided oddity hardly seems like any kind of even “division.”  Then the Times very deceptively indicated that this 63% majority vs. a 37% minority on the part of the candidates was somehow reflective of the electorate: “The findings underscore that the Democratic field, like the electorate, has not moved en masse to left-wing positions on health care.”

Jeezum Christmas!  And did you notice, in that sentence, how the Times, by saying that Medicare for all is “left-wing,” rather than mainstream, uses the opportunity to be deceptive to throw in by implication the caution that there are other positions on health care that are probably too left-wing?

I just got finished publishing a National Notice article about how, over and over again, on issue after issue, the American public is being denied what huge majorities of American want and what sensibly ought to be afforded to everyone.  See: Everybody’s Realizing It Now: The Political Establishment Is Not Willing To Give The Public The Things The Vast Majority Of Americans Want And That We Could Easily Have.

By way of proving that this failure to represent the electorate is getting widely noticed, the article included quite a few lists of issues that a number of sources have come up with, cumulatively a very long list of major issues, where a supermajority of the public wants something (like “net neutrality”), but our establishment of elected officials and major party political candidates seem to think it is their job to prevent it from happening.  Those list makers were: Citizens Defending Libraries (of which I am a co-founder), Michael Moore, Jimmy Dore, Chris Hedges, and Tim Wu.  My article also made the point how it seems like the corporate media acts like it’s its job to play along and endorse the denial of the eminently sensible things on the lists of what supermajorities of Americans want.

Medicare for all came up on pretty much all the lists: that of Citizens Defending Libraries; Michael Moore’s from his film “Fahrenheit 11/9" (a slide of a Reuters polls showing 70% support); Jimmy Dore, citing that 70% of Americans are for medicare for all; Chris Hedges (interviewing Howie Hawkins who wants to become the Green Party presidential candidate stating that 60% of Americans believe it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care, and that 60% of registered voters favor expanding medicare to provide health insurance to every single citizen.  Tim Wu, in his list, did not specifically cite Medicare for all, but noted that “Seventy-one percent think we should be able to buy drugs imported from Canada, and 92 percent want Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices” and he noted “the list goes on.”

Medicare for all is, in fact, just one example of where establishment politicians seem dedicated to not giving the public what it wants, but it is a good example, because not only could the public have Medicare for all, it would save the public trillions of dollars to switch to this universal health care system.  The huge savings are something the press doesn’t like to tell the public about.  Please read the earlier National Notice article to peruse the multiple long lists of major issues that place the public way to the left of their elected representatives and the corporate press.

The Times chart that showed the seven Democratic candidates supporting Medicare for all to be in the lonely minority was interestingly suspect in another respect: The print edition of the Times left out candidate Tulsi Gabbard.  Gabbard is another Medicare for all supporter, an eighth one.  Leaving her out made the minority appear more shrunken.  Further, it removed Gabbard from getting some recognition. The corporate media seems to be working hard to avoid giving Gabbard recognition, and/or to denigrate her: The best explanation for that is that, of all the candidates, Gabbard is clearest in her opposition to America’s perpetual and very expensive wars. .  .  After her debate, Gabbard was far and away the most Googled candidate, even though Ms. Gabbard got the third lowest speaking time in the debate.

The Times explains its Gabbard omission in its subsequently updated digital edition saying, “A 20th candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, later submitted her preference for Medicare for all.” That made Gabbard seem like a laggard who doesn’t know her mind on the issue.  But the Times print article was published June 24, 2019, and here is a very easy to find June 11, 2019 tweet from Gabbard making her stance on the issue extremely clear, as I believe was already quite widely known and easy to find out.

Easy to find  easy to find June 11, 2019 tweet from Tulsi Gabbard that puts Medicare for All at the top of a list of her expressed priorities.

The Times article did point out, with some context, an alternative to Medicare for all:

The public option was once considered too far-reaching — champions of the idea in Congress could not muster quite enough support to include it in the Affordable Care Act in 2010. But it is now seen as a more moderate alternative to Mr. Sanders’s plan, which would all but eliminate private health insurance and enroll everyone in a government-run program.

Helpful?  Implementing a "public option" might lead inevitably to Medicare for all.  And yes, in Obama’s time, it was resisted– Or probably it is better to say it was quickly tossed out by Obama as impossible and antithetical to the interests of the insurance companies he appeased.  But to raise it, is to complicate things.  Complicating things is one of the last tactics that those opposing medicare for all are resorting to.  Anand Giridharas, author of “Winners take All,” about how the wealthy, with pretenses of doing good, steer things in directions very unhealthy to society's general warfare is warning about the health care debate that those fighting for Medicare for all need to keep it “pure, simple,” with “undiluted ideas” expressed in easy to digest ways like “never think about healthcare again because it’s just taken care of.”

During the first Democratic candidate’s debate the corporate media (NBC nightly news anchor Lester Holt in this case) didn’t seem to want it pure and simple, so the question the assembled candidates were asked was not whether they were in favor of Medicare for all; It was whether they favored “abolishing” private healthcare insurance.  Thus, off the bat, the question sounds negative and destructive.  It is also “gnarly” about what that means.  It invokes a lot of wonky debate about whether any private insurance is viewed as being incompatible with Medicare for all.  Only two of the candidates on the stage kept it simple and raised their hands, allowing corporate media pundits to opine that the other candidates must somehow oppose Medicare for all.
           
It ain’t that simple.  The writer of this article is on Medicare, and also has secondary private insurance.  Medicare for all and private insurance needn’t be necessarily incompatible, and that made the question a trick question. True, how Medicare for all will be implemented can inevitably involve nuances.  But big picture, if we are going to get to a better, cheaper system, (and beneficially simpler system too), Anand Giridharas is right, the debate, big picture, needs to be kept simple.  That's  especially true, at least, in those contexts where simple yes/no answers without explanations are being forced out of the candidates.
               
But, let's return the central mind-boggling spectacle here: What are there so many Democrat candidates who theoretically want the democratic nomination for president who are choosing NOT to follow the polls?   It's not just that the American's over all want medicare for all or that even a majority of Republican favor it: In their own Democratic party 84% want Medicare for all, or essentially that.  Do these candidates ignore those polls for some reason of legitimate considered conviction?  Or shouldn't we instead be asking how many of these Democratic party candidates that going against all the polls because they are just rented-out walking billboards, hired to tell the American public “you can’t have want you want” even if it makes sense, even it universal healthcare is what's available almost everywhere else in the civilized world?

Who are all these candidates in the Democratic field?  Where did they come from?  There is s dirty little secret that too few people are talking about concerning why we should expect the field of Democratic candidates to be so extremely crowded this election cycle.  The last election cycle Bernie Sander got so many popular votes in the Democratic primaries that he could have legitimately expected to defeat Hillary Clinton at the Democratic convention, except for the control over the selection of the candidates coming from the party machine.  Much of that control was exerted in the form if the parties control over “super-delegates” who when they voted to secure the nomination for Hillary Clinton at the last convention did not need to represent or be apportioned to reflect what those who voted in the primaries voted for.  Going forward, that system was “reformed” partly by agreement with Sanders wing of the party.  This coming Democratic convention superdelegates will not be allowed to vote. . . . unless and until there is a second round of voting.  If a candidate doesn’t win on the first round of votes there will be a second round of voting.

The more Democratic candidates running in the Democratic field, the greater the insurance that no candidate will win the first round of votes and that the superdelgates from the party machine will be able to enter the fray and again determine the results as they did in 2016 with the selection of  Clinton.  In fact, under these circumstances, the probability that superdelgates may determine things again may be even greater.  It's a mechanism that ensures that the public will not get what it wants.

And one last thing to mention as we close out this topic: Most of the candidates the democrats are fielding were superdelagtes for Hillary Clinton at the 2016 convention, voting against Bernie Sanders.  We heard this first on the Jimmy Dore Show and decided to do the research to check it out . .  And, indeed-

The following fourteen of the candidates were HRC superdelgates: Michael Bennet, Joe Biden, Steve Bullock, John Delaney, Jay Inslee, Amy Klobuchar, Seth Moulton, Beto O’Rourke, Eric Swalwell, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tim Ryan, Elizabeth Warren, John Hickenlooper.

A fifteenth candidate, Julián Castro, was not an HRC superdelegate, but his look alike, also very politically active brother was.

A sixteenth candidate, Bill de Blasio, was also not, but he was once a campaign manager for Hillary Clinton.

Tulsi Gabbard was one of the few superdelagates for Bernie Sanders (and, of course Sanders is, himself a candidate again this year).

That leaves outside of these tallies, a small list: Mike Gravel, Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg, Marianne Williamson, and Kamala Harris.  Kamala Harris, in particular deserves focus because the corporate press seems to be promoting very heavily.  Ms. Harris, who did not prosecute Steve Mnuchin such that he was then able to ascend to become Trump's Secretary of the Treasury, and who shouldn't be regarded as "progressive" (especially as one who has favored mass incarceration), looks like she is also just a product of the Democratic party machine devoted to furnishing non-choices. -  But the Times has her down as favoring Medicare for all.