As Republicans recklessly move forward in doing damage to health care in America, it’s important for Democrats to have a clear vision for the alternative: Medicare-for-All. Democrats must communicate that their goal is straight-forward: to provide complete and affordable health care for all Americans. It’s basic economics. You want to ensure that the demand for goods and services is met by suppliers who are properly remunerated.

The demand for health care is always in flux. Each day, new Americans contract illnesses or are injured. At the same time, Americans are recovering from what had set them back. We as individuals, we as a society, are only as good as we are healthy. It is in everyone’s best interest for us to have a system in which health care is available in a timely and convenient fashion. To those who are taking care of us, it is important for them to be properly paid and to perform their duties in the best of working conditions.

There is nothing engraved in stone that says that insurance companies should be involved with how we do health care. Insurance is legalized gambling, on both the part of the suppliers and the purchasers. That may be acceptable if you go to the race track or a local casino. However, it is far too casual and unreliable to use as an approach to deal with our physical and mental well-being. In insurance, there are winners and losers. When it comes to our wellness, we need “win-win” solutions.

What Republicans are currently doing for insurance companies is not to expand the market as the Affordable Care Act has done. Rather Republicans are minimizing risk by essentially allowing the companies to either not insure people who may require the costliest procedures or to price individuals out of the market. But what Republicans are doing through their approach to health care is not just taking care of insurance companies with whom they are cozy. They are acting in a way that it consistent with one of their basic political, and even psychological, goals: to simply be mean to people about whom they care the least.

At last look, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Republican plan will cause twenty-four million Americans to lose health care.  Eight years ago, under President Obama, our nation talked about how low we could make the number of people who did not have access to health care. With Donald Trump and the Republicans, it’s how many we can remove from our health care system.

Why do they do this? Some, like House Speaker Paul Ryan, would say that it is to be responsible overseers of our federal budget. But it looks and smells much more like overseers of people who they want to keep subservient.

If Republicans really care about balancing the federal budget, as they say, why do they want to balance the budget? The conventional answer is that they care about deficits and deficits cause inflation. Take a look at the two charts below to see how specious this argument is:

As you can see above, the federal debt has grown, almost exponentially, since 1980. But below, you see that inflation has topped 5% only once during that period. Over thirty-five years of recent history clearly shows that running federal deficits has little or nothing to do with inflation [the real factor is what percentage of the GNP is the deficit, but Republicans don’t talk about that.]

So why is it that Republicans constantly harp on wanting to balance the budget? First, by supporting the reduction of federal expenditures, they put themselves in a position to support tax cuts for the wealthy. That’s something they clearly like.

Second, and this is more psychological than political, we have to recognize that there are some people in our society who are just plain mean when it comes to public policy. They almost seem to lack an empathy gene and they don’t care about the suffering of others, particularly if those people are not like them. Why else would you support a health care bill that would reduce $800 billion of taxes on the wealthy while denying twenty-four million people access to health care?

It’s not that Republicans are mean; it’s that those among us who are mean tend to be Republicans¹. Psychologically and politically, there is very little that Democrats and others can do about changing that. But what it does mean is that those who have more of a sense of empathy can try to fashion public policy that provides the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. When it comes to health care, that is clearly Medicare-for-All.

So Democrats, please don’t get bogged down in the details of the Republican policies. Don’t worry about giving a fair shake to the insurance companies? Our goal for those in the health insurance industry should be to help them find gainful employment in the future, just as it is for coal miners.

Not only is Medicare-for-All sound policy, it is good politics. Let’s face it, the American people don’t like complexity. That’s why neither the Republican plan nor the Affordable Care Act are popular.

Keep it simple, when you can. The message and the policy should be Medicare-for-All.

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¹ Many of these people are very cordial and thoughtful towards those who they know. But when it comes to fashioning public policy that serves the common good, they are just plain mean.

The post Democrats: Keep it simple – Medicare-for-All appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It’s been perhaps a generation and a half since America experienced the pain of double-digit inflation. We don’t talk much about inflation these days, because it isn’t happening except in the most minuscule measurements. For years we were told by Republicans that profligate spending by Democrats would put the United States further and further into debt which would mean runaway inflation.

The mantra about preventing inflation has been to raise sufficient revenue to cover budget expenses but to also restrain spending. So what is it that President-elect Donald Trump wants to do?

First, he wants to drastically reduce taxes. Republicans love to point out how fifty-five years ago President John F. Kennedy advocated a slight reduction in taxes in order to put more money in circulation and thus further stimulate the economy. It worked for Kennedy because his tax cuts were minimal. But now Trump wants to drastically reduce taxes on both corporations and on individuals.

There may be merits for reducing corporate taxes, particularly if they bring large sums of monies such as Apple’s $200 billion back to the US from Ireland and other tax havens. But with all business taxes being reduced, it means that the initial impact will be reduced tax revenues for the U.S. government. That leads to more federal borrowing and the likelihood of increased inflation.

On the spending side, Trump wants to create a new economic stimulus through infrastructure construction. This is something that Barack Obama has been trying to do all through his presidency, but except for one moderate jump-start in 2009 following the economic collapse of the final Bush years, Republicans have blocked all attempts by Obama. Why? The most likely reason is because he is Barack Obama and he is a Democrat. But if Donald Trump proposes it to Congress, it will likely pass. This is one of those times when Democrats can be statespersons and support good legislation even though it emanates from a Republican (who borrowed it from a Democrat). The stimulus will likely put people to work and if the projects are not boondoggles, it will improve the condition of our country.

But the final leg of the tripod from Trump will be increased military spending. This is something that Republicans can really glom onto. It’s likely that there will be little consideration to what projects might actually increase American security. Trump and other Republicans think that just the idea of spending more for the military will actually make America safer. In other words, we’re supposed to think that if we spend hundreds of billions of dollars for problematic projects, we will all feel better.

One thing about inflation is that it is class-blind. Unlike unemployment, it equally impacts people of all economic strata. So a word of caution to the Republicans in all branches of government: if you really want to piss off the widest swath of the American public, follow the plan of reducing taxes for the wealthy while dramatically increasing spending, particularly for projects that have minimal marginal return. Higher prices for milk affects some people; not others. Higher prices for luxury cars affects some; not others. Higher prices for rent or home ownership affects virtually everyone.

Democrats will not be able to do much to prevent Republicans for paving the road of inflation. The only way the Republicans might prevent it is by drastically reducing social safety net spending. Trump won the election by capturing the votes of those who are forty-five years of age and older. He should see how much they would like having their Social Security and Medicare gored.

So unless Trump does enough unthinkable things between now and December 19 when the Electoral College “meets,” he will become president. You may need to brace yourself for a ride on the Trumpian Inflation Superhighway.

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