Medicare-for-All Proponents Warn Against Billionaires’ Plan to “Disrupt” Healthcare Industry
“We can do better than a healthcare system run by a rent-seeker, a slumlord and a Wall Street bank. It’s called Medicare for All.”
A newly-announced plan by three of the most prominent billionaires in the U.S. to “disrupt” the American health insurance industry was met with extreme skepticism from advocates of a government-run healthcare system on Tuesday.
Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and J.P. Morgan Chase released a statement saying they would partner to create an independent healthcare company for their employees that would be “free from profit-making incentives and constraints.”
“Our goal is to create solutions that benefit our U.S. employees, their families and, potentially, all Americans,” said J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.
“The ballooning costs of healthcare act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” added Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest people in the world.
The plan, which is in its early stages, represents a sharp turn away from a single-payer healthcare system which would provide care for all Americans, said critics including the Democratic Socialists of America.
. . .
At Jacobin—in a piece titled “You Can’t Trust Capitalists”—Meagan Day and Dustin Guastella warned after Sanders’ Town Hall on Medicare for All last week that single-payer advocates should be wary of any attempts by corporations to wade into the national debate over how healthcare should be provided in the U.S.
“When progressive and left-wing politicians and political organizations neglect to keep capitalists at arm’s length, the latter’s outsize resources give them outsized influence—often resulting in weakened policy and a diluted program,” they wrote. “In order to ensure the eventual passage of comprehensive policy that benefits workers, not just employers, proponents of Medicare for All need to walk a fine line, stoking divisions within the capitalist class without giving the business community a seat at the table.”
Journalist Natalie Shure argued that the only true “disruption” of the health insurance industry would involve covering every American and rejecting a for-profit model altogether.
. . .
Read complete article here.
