My Word | California needs single-payer health care – Eureka Times-Standard

The Feb. 12 T-S piece, “California is a mad scientist,” by (Jon) Coupal and (Brooklyn) Roberts, is a regurgitation of the misinformation, half-truths and fear-mongering that we have been hearing for decades, designed to keep the public trough open to corporate pillaging.

The estimate for California’s 2022 health care is more like $522 billion. The most egregious implication Coupal makes is that changing to a single-payer system would add $163 billion to these ever-growing  health care costs. This is wholly misleading. AB 1400’s solution is not adding to current costs but reducing those costs. AB 1400 would have cost only $222 billion saving California nearly 60% on health care.

How? Health insurance corporations bleed off 30% of the money they take in, not for health care payments but for profit and overhead. As well, our current multi-payer system imposes a costly burden on health care providers as they grapple with the health insurance bureaucracy’s administrative demands of many layers of payment codes, restrictions, requirements and dealing with care denials from so many payers.

Yes, Medicare and Medicaid are getting more and more expensive — in direct proportion to the takeover of these programs by corporate interests. Today, 47% of traditional Medicare (and almost all of  Medicaid) has been usurped by for-profit Medicare Advantage schemes. They take profits from the Medicare Trust Fund by fraudulently demanding upcoded overpayments for its clients. And if you haven’t heard about the venture capitalist DCE program which promises to totally privatize Medicare by 2030, it’s time to Google that (or check out PNHP.org/stopDCEs). Note: Single-payer would not “abolish” Medicare but save it from corporate depredations and expand it to include all residents from cradle to grave for all health care needs.

The savings by eliminating these many payers and unnecessary costs have been clearly documented by many recent studies, including the ultra-conservative Mercatus Center acknowledging that a single-payer system would save the nation some $2 trillion over the next decade.

Witness, too, other developed nations that have enjoyed universal health care under some form of single-payer, some for more than 100 years, spending less with better health outcomes than the US. Just ask any of them if they’d like a “system” like ours.

These savings would benefit every California resident who now pays insurance premiums, co-pays, deductible requirements, out-of-pocket costs, doctor and hospital bills beyond what insurance will cover. A  typical family of four can expect their health care bills to exceed $10,000 per year. These are the “taxes” we now pay. And, while a small percentage of the population is without any insurance at all, there are millions more whose ever-higher premiums and deductibles mean that care is unavailable to them as well.

Replacing this burden with progressive taxes (for those with incomes above $149,509 per year) as suggested in the AB 1400 companion bill,  ACA 11, would require a fraction of what we all now pay, by totally eliminating all the current costs listed above and giving everyone access to care regardless of income, ethnicity, race, or employment.

While we’re at it, let’s dispense with the other old talking points, “care rationing,” “wait lines,” and “death panels.” These are conditions that accurately describe our current dysfunctional system, where care is denied and rationed according to wealth, where a wait line often means no care ever, and our death panels are exposed by some 40,000 people dying here from lack of access to care.

And not the specious DMV and the EDD argument, again? It should be noted that the federal government that administers Medicare spends only 2% of its funds on overhead. Compare that to the typical health insurance company at 19%.  Equally ridiculous is comparing our state budget to what a single-payer system would cost. The budget has nothing at all to do with what people are paying out as individuals nor does it address the burden that payment imposes; namely, bankruptcy,  homelessness and untimely death. These stark realities create additional, collateral costs the state must shoulder and they impact us all as they eat away at our commonweal and ability to function as a productive society.

Regarding Coupal’s vague solution as “finding ways” to help those who “fall through the cracks,” we have found it: a well-designed, well-run, state program with a price tag that will bring financial relief to us all, a guaranteed, high-quality, accessible, universal, transparent, single-payer health care system. Please contact Gov. Gavin Newsom and insist that he make  good on his promise that we “need not wait for single-payer.” We need it now.

Kathryn Donahue is a registered nurse and a Blue Lake resident.