How will the U.S. healthcare system respond to a pandemic? The lack of consumer protections, cost controls and universal coverage is sure to present obstacles to care that many of our most vulnerable Americans will fail to overcome. Learn more in this commentary by HEAL California’s contributor, Mark Wrede.
Commentary:
Coronavirus: Healthcare’s Perfect Storm
(updated 3/25/20)
As the coronavirus spreads, panic is sweeping the world right now. The entire nation of Italy is on lockdown..Japan is canceling public meetings and delaying the Summer Olympics. China, by contrast, has weathered the storm and is ending its quarantine of 50 million people in Hubei province, “the largest quarantine in human history.” and that of the city of Wuhan on Wednesday, April 8. Cruise ships are quarantined in port. Meanwhile stock markets the world over are spiraling downwards as investors attempt to price the cost of the virus to the global economy.
With nearly a half million infected and over twenty thousand dead, coronavirus is hitting hard.
How will the U.S. healthcare system respond?
But as usual, enterprising entrepreneurs are finding ways to profit from disaster. Amazon has moved to bar more than a million products from its online store due to price-gouging and misrepresentation.
Price-gouging and misrepresentation are familiar strategies to Americans who use our healthcare system, but Amazon hasn’t the authority to stop. Instead, Americans have to rely on our government for protection. Unfortunately, the healthcare lobby has succeeded in fending off transformative reform with scare tactics and lavish gifts to legislators and policymakers.
Insufficient Regulatory Protection
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) — a regulatory framework overlaying our for-profit healthcare system — eliminated some of the most egregious practices of the health insurance industry. But when it came to fundamentally transforming our healthcare system, the ACA failed. It not only lacked cost-controls, it set healthcare inequality in stone with varying levels of insurance coverage linked to one’s ability to pay.
Even still, the private health insurance industry found the ACA’s modest regulatory controls intolerable, and with the support of the GOP and the Trump Administration, they responded with new products that evade ACA regulations.
Short-term insurance with low premiums and high out-of-pocket costs have been introduced as supposed low-cost insurance alternatives, but these plans often prove lacking when patients need care. In a brief filed last week by the Association for Community Affiliated Plans in the U.S. District Court of Appeals in its ongoing lawsuit against administration rules expanding coverage of such insurance plans, Margaret Murray of ACAP explained:
“This is a largely unregulated insurance product that uses fine print and bureaucracy to keep premium as profit and out of the hands of providers that deliver needed medical services.”
“Unfortunately, these plans have been encouraged to proliferate — and it’s entirely possible that they may keep people from seeking needed medical attention and contribute to the spread of the coronavirus here in the U.S.”
Vulnerable Americans may avoid seeking care
To see why, consider how this epidemic has spread. People traveling from China unwittingly carried the disease all over the world in just a few days before it was recognized, potentially contaminating public places including airports, harbors, and train and bus stations along the way. They took taxis or Uber to hotels or their next connections. They ate at restaurants, as well, and so met a continuing series of service workers.
Despite being in the front lines of the infection, it is service workers who are among the most likely to be either uninsured or buyers of bogus insurance products that appear to be affordable. Because they are struggling to make ends meet, they are more likely to come to work even if they aren’t feeling well. One in four American workers doesn’t even have sick leave! So it may be the Uber driver, the clerk at the drugstore, or any of the people who bus the table or prepare or serve the food where you dine that could bring the virus into contact.
Once passed, however, anyone may become a carrier. As it is 44 percent of Americans don’t turn to medical help when they’re sick because of the high costs of treatment. Our current flawed healthcare system and growing inequality can deliver us into the perfect storm of this pandemic or its eventual successors.
Medicare for All: Guaranteed healthcare security
Yet it does not have to be this way! With guaranteed healthcare, every resident could confidently follow up for care without fear of incurring unaffordable costs. With dramatically lowered insurance premiums made possible by Medicare for All, the prospect for nipping such outbreaks in the bud are greatly improved, not to mention the accessibility to medical attention required to stay alive.
Medicare for All would provide Americans from all walks of life with healthcare security as we face this current crisis and others to come.
–Mark Wrede
Mark Wrede is a freelance content researcher and writer living in Los Angeles, California. markwrede@ca.rr.com
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