As Republicans recklessly move forward in doing damage to health care in America, it\u2019s 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<\/u> Americans. It\u2019s basic economics. You want to ensure that the demand for goods and services is met by suppliers who are properly remunerated.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cwin-win\u201d solutions.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
At last look, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Republican plan will cause twenty-four million Americans to lose health care. \u00a0Eight 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\u2019s how many we can remove from our health care system.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n