Medicare For All Starting To Look Pretty Good To People As Premiumpocalypse Looms

It's almost as if people don't want to spend half of their income on health care?

Flickr, United Workers

In less than a month, barring some kind of congressional intervention that probably isn’t going to happen at this point, the ACA subsidies are going to end and monthly premiums are going to skyrocket for the 90 percent of ACA enrollees who are relying on them.

Americans aren’t too happy about that — even during the shutdown, over 70 percent of us still wanted to see them extended, including half of Republicans (also — 72 percent of “non-MAGA” Republicans).

This may be part of why recent polling has shown that a large majority of Americans are once again in favor of Medicare for All.

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It’s true! A survey from Data For Progress published late last month found that 65 percent of us either strongly or somewhat support “creating a national health insurance program, sometimes called ‘Medicare for All,’” including 49 percent of Republicans.

Now, you may be thinking “That’s still less than it was back in 2018, when 70 percent of Americans supported it” — and that’s true. However, what’s more significant is that the number of those who said they supported it only dropped by two percent when told that it would involve eliminating private insurance and raising taxes.

This is a really big deal. As you may recall, the anti-M4A crowd was able to put a significant dent in people’s belief that there was a chance it could ever become reality after a poll came out showing that support for socialized healthcare decreased significantly when people were told it would involve eliminating private health insurance companies.

“See? People love their private health insurance companies!” they cried. “They LOVE them like they love their very own mothers and they will hate you forever if you take them away!”

That was, to be clear, an absolutely disingenuous, bullshit question. Why? Because if Medicare For All were actually implemented as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others planned, there would be no need for private health insurance. The whole point was that it would cover everything and be free at the point of service. If it covered everything, what is it that anyone thinks the private insurance companies would do? Just take money from people for no reason?

What they also were not told is that eliminating those companies is one of the main things — if not the main thing — that would decrease our healthcare costs. Recent data cited by the American Hospital Association found that nearly 40 percent of hospital costs are administrative, and practically all of those administrative costs are billing- and insurance-related. It costs a lot of money to bill all of these different insurance companies and negotiate coverage, so if it all goes to one place and everything is covered, that is a whole lot of money we’d all save.

It becomes even more absurd when you consider that insurance providers use 15-20 percent of your premiums to pay for administrative costs — like specifically paying people to figure out how to get out of covering the medical care you need, and, in fact, have been paying them for, month after month for probably most of your adult life. The entire purpose of health insurance companies is to take your money and not give it back to you. That is stupid and there is, truly, no good reason for it. It is certainly not a thing anyone, in any sane universe, ought to get rich off of doing.

If we were to have a national plan and keep private insurers around, it would pretty much eliminate most of the cost-saving benefits of a national plan and also create a system wherein healthcare providers could just refuse to take it, like they do with so many ACA plans or Medicaid, and we’d end up in a situation where people said “Oh shit, let’s stop this now and never revisit it again.”

We also would not have the help of the rich. The fact is, when rich people have to use the same things as the rest of us, those things improve because they have more power and others with power are more likely to listen to them. I’m sorry, but it’s true. The whole point of an insurance group — specifically being one big insurance group instead of 87,000 disparate insurance groups — is having leverage. We want whatever is going to give us the most leverage. It’s literally collective bargaining, which is why the conservative dream of State Farm-esque “personal price plans just for you” (lord how that commercial lives rent-free in my head) is patently ridiculous. Highly individualized plans would be obscenely expensive, not to mention pretty much useless in the event of a serious accident or health event.

There should not be tiers in health care. Unless, you know, we create one tier for normal people and one tier for Ivermectin-huffing religious zealots so we don’t have to hear their complaints about not liking what kind of health care other people get.

Do I think that most people are thinking about this so deeply when they say they want Medicare For All and they don’t give a shit if the private insurers go away forever? Probably not. I think they just want health care and are pissed off at the health insurance companies that are bleeding them dry. They may also have had some time to consider that this “choice” they were led to believe they had is more or less non-existent. They may have even realized that “choice,” in the context of healthcare, isn’t actually a good thing, since it means that not everything is covered.

I mean, hell. If you really want “choice,” you should want people to be able to leave their jobs or start their own businesses without fearing that it’s going to affect their spouse’s ability to continue their cancer treatments.

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To that end, it’s worth noting that the Affordable Care Act is also currently very popular. More popular than ever, in fact, with a 57 percent approval rate (91 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of independents and 15 percent of Republicans). Clearly, people really want to send a message to Washington that they don’t want the subsidies to end — that they find the idea of a world where people are going broke just trying to pay for their insurance, nevermind their actual care, to be pretty unappealing.

Or, you know, they just fucking want healthcare themselves.

It will be a good few years before we have any chance of making Medicare For All (or even the subsidies, if no extension is passed) happen, but it’s probably a good idea to keep reminding people exactly who it is that doesn’t think they should have to choose between paying their rent and going to the doctor.

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