Taking on Corporate Healthcare in America
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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.
How has the coronavirus pandemic affected the fight for universal healthcare in America? What would it take for Medicare for All to become a nationwide reality today? To find out, we spoke to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, physician, politician and co-author of the new book “Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide.”
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Welcome to Code WACK!, Dr. El-Sayed.
El-Sayed: Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here with you.
Q: How did the COVID pandemic affect your perspective on Medicare for All and how you framed this book?
El-Sayed: Well, it makes the fight that much more urgent for two reasons. Number one, I think people are now a lot more wise to the games that the insurance industry and the healthcare industry play. And also I think we’ve come to appreciate exactly how catastrophic the failures can be for people and so you know watching my friends — people I graduated medical school with — struggle to make it all work for their patients, for their loved ones, for the friends without any real confidence that the healthcare system would be there for them in the ways that they need it, that is an indictment, right, and I think it just dials up the urgency.
And the second point is, you know, in politics, momentum is everything. And I think we have this moment where because people are newly wise to the failures of our system, there’s going to be a lot more push. And, look, I know that President (Joe) Biden doesn’t support Medicare for All. I was one of eight on the task force appointed by Senator (Bernie) Sanders that helped to write President Biden’s ultimate platform. We were pushing as hard as we could to get them to embrace Medicare for All. I carried the Medicare-for-All amendment to the Democratic Party platform at the party’s platform meeting, and obviously, it was voted down but I know that President Biden doesn’t support this, but I also know that what we choose to do right now builds the potential future where Medicare for All becomes possible, even if it may not happen in the next three to seven years.
And so I just think that we have a real responsibility to step up now to articulate the truth for what it is before the insurance industry and healthcare industry spend billions of dollars to erase the narrative and reshape it in their own interest so that they can continue to make the billions of dollars they’ve made through the course of the pandemic that watched 15 million people lose their health insurance and doctors and nurses struggle to be able to provide care.
Q: Hmm. Right. So speaking of Biden, a new federal Medicare for All bill has been introduced into the House of Representatives one year into the coronavirus pandemic. We know Biden’s position. What would a path to success look like for this bill?
El-Sayed: I think it would mean continuing to build momentum by pulling more and more support onto the bill, and the support of folks like (U.S. Rep.) Frank Pallone. Frank Pallone is nobody’s progressive. He’s a 17- term veteran of Congress. In the last go around, right, in the last Congress, he did not support Medicare for All. In fact he blocked hearings as chair of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, and this time around, he’s not only a supporter he’s promised hearings, and that’s a big deal.
And so we have to continue to build the on-the-ground momentum that moves the Frank Pallones in Congress towards support. It also means that we take on the power of corporations, and we show the ways that they have manipulated this conversation, this narrative, the political reality in their favor, and even for folks who do support Medicare for All, at this point, it should come with a trade off, right. You can’t continue to take money from the very corporations whose existence relies on us not having Medicare for All, and say to your voters with a straight face that you’re supporting Medicare for All, so it’s both of those things. We need more support and less power to the corporations who have dominated the system as it stands, and all of that is founded on people like you and me.
It’s people like you and me deciding that we are going to become organizers and I don’t mean that with a capital O. You don’t have to go and work with, you know, an organization dedicated Medicare for all, if you do, that’s great. I hope you will. Right? I know there are all kinds of great ones, whether it’s the nurses union or Public Citizen or Social Security Works or Center for Popular Democracy or some of the other progressive organizations, People’s Action, namely, but it also just means becoming an organizer with a lowercase o, right? Deciding that you’re going to, you know, have this conversation with your loved ones and your friends and the people that you work with and help them to find themselves in this discussion.
One of the things that we wanted to do with this book was to help people find themselves in the healthcare debate, right? It sometimes feels like your healthcare experiences here, and then everyone else’s experience of healthcare is there. And then somewhere else is this broken healthcare system, but really they are all one thing, right, the broken healthcare system, every day, takes a cut out of your life, and what we wanted was to rub down some of that opacity, right? Make it a little bit more transparent, let some sunshine in so folks can find themselves in this discussion and say, ah, “I know why I pay so much of a premium. I understand why they’re trying to charge me a deductible. I get why they’re trying to deny me health care and it has everything to do with the fact that that hospital is closing down in that town. This hospital is consolidating in this town and that pharmaceutical organization over there is trying to get me to buy their prescription drug I probably don’t need.” All of those things are related, and our hope with this book was to show how.
Q: Hmmm. Great. I’m curious what kind of feedback you’ve gotten so far from the book?
El-Sayed: Well, I’m grateful that the feedback has generally been good… Our goal was we did not want to have an esoteric, academic conversation. We wanted this to really be a citizen’s guide and I think that from the feedback that we’ve gotten that this has been a helpful book. The feedback that I enjoy getting the most is when folks will will reach out to me in the way that you can during a pandemic and say, you know, I did not support Medicare for All until I read this book, and it’s helped me to see what’s broken, and how we fix it and why Medicare for All is so much better a solution to all of our problems than the tinkering around the edges that I’m told that we need to do, and that’s really gratifying because that’s what it’s going to take.
That person who’s not a political activist is now having these conversations with their loved ones in ways that are getting them to think differently and getting them to see the world how it is, right? Getting them to break down some of the barriers that the system has erected to allow itself to continue to work like this in the dark. And so I’m really grateful that folks are picking it up and they are sharing it and they are engaging with it and it’s not just the usual suspects.
Q: Right. So you and your co-author, is it Dr. Micah Johnson, did extensive research for this book interviewing lots of experts. I’m curious if there was anything that most surprised you in your research and in talking to either experts or citizens?
El-Sayed: You know, a lot of the people who come out of the Clinton and then Obama healthcare fights carry a lot of PTSD from that experience and it shapes so much the level of imagination that people are willing to have with what’s possible. Right? And you know they reached the conclusion that they tried incremental reform and got major pushback. Hence, serious reform like Medicare for All is just impossible and my argument is that they just didn’t go far enough, right? Because what they didn’t have on their side was a massive movement of people inspired by an idea. Cause I’ll be honest with you, right, the notion of a health insurance exchange is just not a very inspiring thing, right? The notion of universal health coverage that’s with you no matter what happens to you in your life. that is. And what happened is in being incremental, they got all the pushback and none of the benefit.
And my argument is that, instead of going too far, they didn’t go far enough. And that really was a big takeaway from the research that we did from this book. Now, that sounds crazy, especially to a lot of the folks who live inside the Beltway and think they know everything there is to know about health care, but they don’t live out in communities like Michigan, or Florida or you name the place where you’ve got everyday people who are suffering the consequence of a lack of imagination and lack of political courage to go all the way because those folks would join the fight if we gave them something to fight for.
Q: Great. Was there anything (else) you’d like to mention more about your book ,”Medicare for All: A Citizen’s Guide” or about the Medicare-for-All fight?
El-Sayed: Yes, I hope that you will pick up the book. Micah and I put a lot of effort into it and we hope that it’s a useful tool and it’s not just for folks who believe in Medicare for All. It’s for folks who are skeptical and even if you come out disagreeing, hopefully your disagreements will be that much more based in evidence.
And the second piece is that this fight matters for everyone. It is every single person who has got a body — which I went to med school, everybody’s got a body– you are part of this fight, whether you like it or not, whether you choose to be a part of it or not because there’s someone out there monetizing your illness, or the potential for your illness in ways that probably don’t benefit you and so I hope you will become a part of it, whether that’s joining one of the organizations I talked about earlier, deciding you will make phone calls, send text messages or knock on doors or it’s just deciding you will be one of those organizers with a lowercase o who is having these conversations with the people that you love and care about. This is your fight, too, and my hope is that you find yourself in it.
Q: Thank you Dr. El-Sayed.
Find more Code WACK! episodes on ProgressiveVoices.com and on the PV App. You can also subscribe to Code WACK! wherever you find your podcasts. This podcast is powered by HEAL California, uplifting the voices of those fighting for health care reform around the country. I’m Brenda Gazzar.
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