The Case for Medicare for All: How to Stop Multi-Billion Dollar Annual transfers of Wealth from the US public to the Healthcare Industry Elite
Last week Les Bernal from Stop Predatory Gambling cited a 2018 Marketwatch report that indicated ” Over the next eight years the US public will lose $1T of personal wealth to government sanctioned gambling, 500B of which is coming mainly low income populations”
A 2022 nationwide investigation of state lotteries by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of MD confirmed the same, revealing the result is a multibillion-dollar wealth transfer from low-income U.S. communities to powerful multinational companies to the tune of $29 billion lost annually by players in the 45 states (plus Washington, D.C.) that have a lottery.
This week we examine another profiteering industry that essentially results in another fraudulent “multibillion dollar transfer from the US public to another elite economic industry sector, namely the US health care industry. We pay more receive less and live shorter lives.
Dr. James G. Kahn, emeritus professor of health policy, University of California San Francisco. Leading researcher in the cost and effectiveness of health intervention programs, and in US health care financing reform returns to BLID to explain this phenomena. We review his peer reviewed research article that helps explain why with only 4% of the world’s population, the cumulative mortality attributable to COVID-19 in the US through March 14, 2022 was over 973,000 reported deaths in the United States which composes only 4% of the global population yet had 16% of the world’s Covid related deaths. And how this disproportionate toll is magnified when comparing the US to similarly affluent countries and led to over 338 thousand excess deaths from Covid due to broken market driven healthcare system that prioritizes profits over people. Dr Kahn also explains how Medicare Advantage is gamed
Other shocking indictments are revealed such as:
1. Our healthcare system is so bad that 40% of US public skip or delay or skip treatment due to cost issues.
2. Particularly costly has been profiteering among insurance companies participating in the Medicare Advantage (MA) program. By gaming, aka upcoding, Medicare risk codes and the ways in which comparative “benchmarks” are set for expected costs, health care estimates suggest, MA will cost Medicare over $600 billion more in the next 8 years than would have been the case if the same enrollees had remained in traditional Medicare.
We Bring Light to the scientific data that suggests, “The cycle is vicious: unchecked greed concentrates wealth, wealth concentrates political power, and political power blocks constraints on greed.”