As Medicare for All grows more popular, its opponents grow more brazen. Behind the scenes, the health insurance lobby is busy spinning lies and spending money to influence the American people and our legislators.
By Sylvia Moore. HEAL California. March 4, 2019
As the political popularity of Medicare For All gains steam, the health insurance industry is pulling out new foot soldiers in a desperate effort to stop it. With members of the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives reportedly drafting bills for a single-payer health care system, and Medicare For All-champion, Sen. Bernie Sanders, re-launching his bid for the presidency, Big Insurance is running scared.
So scared in fact, according to the New York Times, the insurance lobby is creating a well-timed public relations campaign to boost the Affordable Care Act, while attacking the Democrats’ plans to expand Medicare.
The lobbyists’ message is simple: The Affordable Care Act is working reasonably well and should be improved, not repealed by Republicans or replaced by Democrats with a big new public program. More than 155 million Americans have employer-sponsored health coverage. They like it, by and large, and should be allowed to keep it.
Big Insurance’s latest misinformation efforts are being underwritten by a coalition calling itself the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, made up of the hospital, insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies. Their message features the same tired talking points used to try to torpedo the original Medicare system in the 1960s, and more recently, Hillary Clinton’s health plan in the 1990s and the same Affordable Care Act they profess to love now. Talking points like “big government,” “government-run health care” and “socialized medicine” are, frankly, racist dog whistles used by the right wing for decades to scare conservative white voters into rejecting any sort of public program that would also benefit people of color. But as the demographics of the United States rapidly changes, those shopworn scare tactics soon won’t work anymore.
It’s fascinating that the insurance lobby is even trying to head off the political winds in universal health care’s favor by not only favoring expanding federal subsidies, but also expanding Medicaid in those states that have refused to do so. The Times may find that admirable, but there are problems with keeping the status quo as is. The U.S.’s employer-based health care system depends upon everybody being able to find a job and keep it, let alone one that provides good coverage.
Employment discrimination based on race, gender, age, religion and/or sexual orientation/identity may be illegal, but we all know it goes on all the time. And even in a good economy, still not everyone can get a job. And yes, Medicaid has done a decent job of providing poor people with a modicum of health coverage, but because it’s a program aimed at helping the poor, it’s constantly vulnerable to cuts and outright elimination, as we’ve seen in conservative states. Expanding Medicare to everyone – rich and poor – would be much more politically viable in the long run.
The fact that the Democratic Party and even the current crop of presidential candidates are starting to catch up with popular public sentiment on Medicare For All shows that the insurance lobby’s stranglehold on our health care system may quickly be coming to an end.
Sylvia Moore is a Medicare-for-All activist and board member of California OneCare from Los Angeles, California. sylvia@heal-ca.org
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