Featuring Michael Lighty, founding fellow of the Sanders Institute and former healthcare constituency director for Bernie 2020:
Why won’t our legislators take up the political fight against health insurers and pharmaceutical companies? How can we shift the definition of what’s politically possible when it comes to our health care? In this third episode in a podcast series with host Brenda Gazzar, Michael Lighty, founding fellow of the Sanders Institute and former healthcare constituency director for Bernie 2020, discusses the need for a broad reorganization of society based on racial justice, solidarity and compassion.
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Health Care’s Transformative Moment
—– TRANSCRIPT —–
Opening MUSIC – “Talk Back” 10 seconds, fade down
Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host Brenda Gazzar. Today, we’ll look at the grim realities of our current healthcare system.
Michael Lighty has organized, advocated and developed policy for single-payer, Medicare for All nationally and in California for nearly 29 years. He’s a founding Fellow of the Sanders Institute. Most recently, he was the healthcare constituency director for Bernie 2020.
Welcome to Code WACK!, Michael.
Lighty: Thank you Brenda. It’s great to be here.
Q: You’ve mentioned that the business community, the health foundations and the labor movement need to work together to achieve Medicare for All. Is that happening on any level in California today?
Lighty: No, I mean the Healthy California for All Commission presents an opportunity to do it. It’s engaging in what are called stakeholders in a process, right? If you get down to it, the intermediaries in health care are the insurance industry. They don’t add any value. They waste about 30 percent of healthcare costs on their own administrative bureaucracy and marketing and profits. But why are the other players subsidizing their profits? So that’s why we have a common interest among workers, among unions, among business.
We shouldn’t have to pay for what adds no value to our health care system. Let’s eliminate their role and put those savings directly back into health care. So there’s this profound potential consensus on policy but there is this political problem…People don’t want to take on the fight.
Q: Got it. So they don’t want to take on the fight for lives. Why do you think that is?
Lighty: Yes, why don’t people want to save lives? Why is that? It’s hard. They’re deeply entrenched. It’s always easier to believe, ‘well, if we just cover everyone, right, if we just provide access, then we’ll solve the problem’ rather than saying ‘no, these institutions are ripping us off and they’re killing people. And the way we finance health care is killing people’ and that has all sorts of implications. Gee, if we’re going to finance health care through public taxation, maybe we can finance housing, maybe we can have a public works job program funded by taxes.
Oh, you mean the wealthy are going to actually pay their fair share for health care when we know the wealthy have the greatest impact on public policy. Right? We’ve known that for years. If the wealthy believe (in) something, it’s much more likely for it to happen, if they oppose it, it won’t. When you can put up a pharmaceutical cost control initiative on the ballot and the pharmaceutical companies can throw $137 million dollars at it, well that’s kind of a deterrent. People say ‘whoa, we can’t take that on. We’re not going to win that fight.’ And yet what we know and what we are seeing on the streets every day is that people power makes change, it changes what’s politically possible. And that’s really where we really need to be on health care.
Q: So do you think it will take people protesting on the streets en masse before this happens?
Lighty: I think it has to be part of the broad justice movement. We’re not going to get people out on the streets just on health care I don’t think, though I think that’s what it would take. I think we’re going to get people out on the streets demanding a different moral and social way of being in this country that puts justice and solidarity, community, caring and compassion at the heart of our society and that’s ultimately what I think the Movement for Black Lives, what the Poor People’s Campaign, what the demands for racial justice reform, L.A. Jails — this is what this movement is about and this is what the advocates who have been working in communities of color are about.
So we understand it’s a transformative moment. Care not cops — that’s really one way to put it. The bottom line, the new bottom line has to be guaranteed health care as part of a broad reorganization of society based on justice, and specifically racial justice.
Q: I see. Black Lives Matter was thrust into the mainstream again with the murder of George Floyd. So what will it take for that to happen with Medicare for All?
Lighty: I think Medicare for All is in the mainstream. It’s really quite something. Ok, support for Medicare for All has gone up 9 points since the pandemic has started. You’ve got 70 percent-plus support among Democrats. Just think for a second an issue that has 70 percent-plus support among Republicans that the Republicans aren’t fighting for. It’s hard to come up with one. Right? So it’s a matter of public will among the Democrats. Independents, swing voters supposedly majority support for Medicare for All. It’s not an issue necessarily that people are going to vote on, but the pandemic may very well change that by the time it ultimately plays out.
So I think what we have to do is we have to recognize just like Medicare was implemented at the height of the civil rights movement, in ‘65-’66, Medicare for All is going to be a part of this uprising for racial justice and this demand for a reorganization of the values and the programs of our society. That is what I think ultimately puts it in the mainstream. There is simply no way to address the health inequities unless we go to Medicare for All.
And so just like we’re going to have to adopt other programs to address the public health crisis of police violence, to address the public health crisis of the incarceration of immigrants at the border, the public health crisis of the restrictions on women’s access to abortion or reproductive health, we are going to have to do that through Medicare for All.
Thanks so much Michael.
Find more Code WACK! episodes at ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV app. You can also listen at heal-ca.org. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for healthcare reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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