They’ve Never Been More Mutually Exclusive – Viable Healthcare or Profitable Healthcare

 

“Without adequate health care, no one can make full use of his or her talents and opportunities. It is thus just as important that economic, racial and social barriers not stand in the way of good health care as it is to eliminate those barriers to a good education and a good job.” 

Republican President Richard M Nixon, February 1974

It’s no secret that the United States has the best medical research, treatment and medicines, technology and trained doctors. It is also no secret that our medical system does not work to reach enough people on a cost-effective basis, many Americans have no coverage at all, medical bankruptcies are still most common (even for people with healthcare insurance), the effective cost per capita of healthcare is double or more what such costs are in even the developed world and the United States remains the only developed nation in the world without universal healthcare.

Yet, profits for US-based healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies and those middlemen who are supposed to mediate between pharmas and patients, and many medical specialists have never been higher. Medical students running up six figure tuition debt is the norm, and they have to wait through years of residency and, if a specialty is required, fellowship, to begin to earn enough to bear the cost of repayment. We’re watching pharma’s spending millions of dollars in consumer ad campaigns to tout their discoveries. They claim they need higher prices to cover research, but fancy ad campaigns are part of the cost. And yes, Americans pay a multiple over the cost of drugs in the rest of the covered developed world for the same products.

To compound the problem, even where wages are comparable, healthcare costs under private union agreements add significant costs to US-made products, but when such costs are just subsumed under the universal healthcare plans elsewhere, are always vastly less expensive per capita than the US. For example, US automakers moved major manufacturing plants to Canada (same wages, but no healthcare costs) just to cut a couple of thousand dollars per vehicle off the manufacturing cost.

Let’s face it, the healthcare pharma industry has spent small fortunes to make sure universal healthcare never graces our shores. Willing politicians with their hands perpetually outstretched and rightwing conspiracy theorists willing to redefine dictionary definitions (conveniently conflating normal social programs with “creeping socialism”) – even being shocked at the audacity of the Biden Administration to cap the price of drugs like insulin – to make it seem un-American to have universal healthcare. Hard to think of Germany – making Mercedes and Porsches – as a socialist country with all those very profitable corporations there.

But the idea for a universal healthcare plan was first introduced by a Republican President half a century ago. On February 6, 1974, President Nixon presented his Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan, or CHIP, to Congress in an effort to outline and define his intentions for a health care reform program that would go into effect in 1976. At the beginning of his report, he explains that overall healthcare costs have risen over 20% since 1971, and that the standing average cost of a day-long hospital stay is over $110. On top of the rising cost of healthcare, over 25 million Americans were still uninsured in 1974. 40% of Americans who were insured were not covered for visits to a physician’s office on an outpatient basis, and very few private health care policies covered preventative services. Furthermore, less than half of Americans under the age of 65 and almost none of Americans over the age of 65 had major medical health coverage…

“The benefits of each plan were identical for all Americans, regardless of age or economic status. These benefits would cover hospital stays, physician care, prescription medications, and medical devices as well as other necessary care. There would be no exclusion of coverage based on the nature of the illness or a preexisting condition. CHIP would also cover treatment for mental illness, alcoholism or addiction regardless of where the treatment is administered.” Nixon Library Website. Where the profit motive is a precondition to building or providing a viable treatment, it seems pretty clear that the best interest of consumer healthcare is not determinative. Not only are treatments often much more expensive than they need to be… sometimes no one steps up to make them. Not profitable. Like that very essential antibiotic, now in generic status, amoxicillin.

“A cavernous factory in northeastern Tennessee, by the Virginia border, is one of the last in the country that makes a vitally important medicine… Each day the USAntibiotics plant churns out a million doses of the crucial antibiotic amoxicillin that promise to cure Americans of everything from earaches to pneumonia—and ease a pressing shortage for children.

“But the plant’s prospects are dim. It can’t charge enough to cover overhead, because competitors sell their wares at bargain prices. USAntibiotics isn’t close to breaking even… ‘It’s not for lack of trying,’ said Rick Jackson, a health-staffing businessman who rescued the factory from near bankruptcy two years ago and has poured more than $38 million into purchasing and refurbishing it… The generic drug business has become a hostile environment for American companies. Prices for the often critical medicines have dropped so low that it has become difficult for U.S. manufacturers to compete with companies overseas.

“One after another, generic-drug makers have gone bankrupt or moved their operations overseas or cut the number of products they offer. The number of facilities making generic drugs in their final form in the U.S. has dropped by roughly 20% since 2018, to 243, according to federal data.

“Drug shortages have become common. Today, 300 medicines are in short supply, according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. Regularly now, hospitals and patients must scramble to find doses of the drugs they need if there is one hiccup in a pinched supply chain or a quality problem shuts down a manufacturing line.” Wall Street Journal, July 26th. It really does come down to a question of our values: the health of our citizens vs the mega-profits of the entire medical/healthcare industry. Pick one; they truly are mutually exclusive.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the very political party that initially proposed universal healthcare, Republicans, have done everything in their power to keep that necessity, that common political program, from ever being installed here.