Featuring Michael Lighty, founding fellow of the Sanders Institute and former healthcare constituency director for Bernie 2020:
Will “a little bit of this and a little bit of that” solve America’s healthcare problems? Is COVID-19 a game-changer in the fight for single-payer? In this first episode of a podcast series with host Brenda Gazzar, Michael Lighty discusses the Medicare-for-All movement and the Democratic Party’s new unity task force.
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—– TRANSCRIPT —–
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 talk about the prospects of Medicare for All in light of the national political scene and the coronavirus pandemic.
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 been a long time champion for Medicare for All, how did you get involved in the movement and what does it mean to you personally?
Lighty: Well, it means a lot to me personally because I’m a diabetic and so I have a personal stake in a lot of the issues in terms of getting the health care we need, controlling prescription drug prices and not seeing others who don’t have the resources that I’ve had — because I’ve had jobs with good private insurance — who end up with quite severe cases, amputations and other diseases so it hits home very directly.
I got into this first really back in the early 90s when I was director of Democratic Socialists of America and we brought Canadian nurses and doctors to tour the United States at a time when healthcare reform had gotten back on the agenda and that was the period ultimately that resulted in the HillaryCare struggle so it has been a few decades at this point .
Q: Wow, that’s amazing. Senator Bernie Sanders, who has spearheaded the campaign for Medicare for All, suspended his presidential campaign earlier this year. A joint task force set up by Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, and Sanders recently released platform recommendations, including healthcare reform that focuses on expanding ObamaCare rather than moving toward Medicare for All. Are these significant setbacks for the movement and where do you go from here?
Lighty: It’s not a surprise so I don’t think it can be characterized as a setback. We knew going into the unity task force discussion that the Biden people, even though they contain a group of individuals that would support Medicare for All, have expressed public support for Medicare for All, we knew they would not actually adopt it as a task force recommendation. So the question is what was going to come out of it?
It is disappointing that there’s no mention of Medicare for All, that there is not even a kind of signal that we can do state single-payer. There’s a reference to state universal healthcare approaches. There is a reference to other aspects so in that sense it’s a disappointment. On the other hand, there are provisions for expanded direct provision of care through community clinics, Federally Qualified Health Centers, the potential to provide new money for rural facilities perhaps reopening rural hospitals, a nod toward all-payer rate regulation and a robust version of the public option. None of these will solve the problem and what’s of course ironic is that they go through all these complexities and fragmented approaches and a little of this and a little of that, when Medicare for All could do it simply in one fell swoop and do it efficiently and save lots of money. So we’re going to continue that fight and we’re not giving up on the platform yet. We want stronger language, we want a reference to Medicare for All and we want real support for state single-payer.
Q: Good to know. In April, you told the San Francisco Chronicle that the coronavirus pandemic is a game changer, the X factor, in terms of getting Medicare for All. If you still believe that to be true, what evidence have you seen so far that it is true?
Lighty: Well just this report yesterday came out that 5.5 million workers lost their private health insurance when they lost their job so this is what I mean. It shows the failure of the private insurance system. We had a representative from the California Federation of Labor at a meeting recently this week who said employer-based insurance doesn’t work for workers so that’s really what I was referring to Brenda. Now, on the other hand you have to look at this and you have to say Black people are dying at two-and-a-half times the rate of white people from the pandemic, millions have lost their health insurance, there are huge gaps in coverage and access — people can’t afford to get the tests they need when they go in for a corona diagnosis, the test might be $600 or it might be $3,000. So you have to wonder why no one has put Medicare for All on the agenda who is in a position to do so, not [U.S. House of Representatives] Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi, not the Democratic leadership in the Senate, not the Joe Biden campaign so you got to ask, what does it take — what does it take — when people are literally dying because they don’t have the health care they need. So it is in a sense a moral clarion call that the pandemic represents.
And you’ve seen it picked up in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, it’s on the agenda of the Poor People’s Campaign, it’s on the agenda of the movement for Black lives, it is on the agenda when you talk to folks who are out on the street demanding racial justice. They all know we need a system of guaranteed health care. So I’m quite frustrated that policymakers and people in real positions of power have not recognized what ordinary folks know, which is we have to go to Medicare for All if we’re going to guarantee health care and we’re going to get out of this pandemic in a way that actually meets people’s healthcare needs.
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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