US Athletes Discover Joys Of Universal Healthcare In Olympic Village
This is one of those feel-good stories that is actually very depressing when you think about it!
There’s a lot of money to be made on the Olympics — though not necessarily by the people participating in them (or most people who live in the host cities). Those athletes who participate don’t get paid (unless they get sponsorship deals) and, as a result, many of them go into poverty while trying to go for the gold. Training costs are huge and so, often, are the medical bills.
But not when they’re at the Olympic Village!
Ariana Ramsey, who won a bronze medal as part of the US female rugby team has been going viral on TikTok, talking about how amazing it’s been getting free healthcare at the Olympic Village — and in the days following her victory, she was able to celebrate by going to the gynecologist, dentist and an ophthalmologist, where she was able to get free glasses as well.
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Ramsey came to Paris as a rugby player. She is leaving as a healthcare influencer. More than 135,000 people have watched her initial TikTok, and another of the half-dozen follow-up videos she has made has pulled in more than 570 views. That is fine with her. The more she thinks about it, the more frustrated she is that she’s so astonished by the concept.
“That’s just America and their privatized healthcare system,” she laments in an interview, adding, “I’ll fight for universal healthcare.”
The idea has gone viral in France: American discovers healthcare. “A lot of people are kind of making a joke about it,” she says. “Like, welcome to France.”
You know we should all be deeply embarrassed by this, right? Like, someone goes to the Olympics, in Paris, gets a bronze medal and the thing they’re excited about is that they got a pap smear? That is an indictment of our healthcare system if ever there was one. We look like fools.
The United States is the only developed nation on earth that does not have universal healthcare. Every other country has figured out that it makes far, far more sense (and is far, far more economically sane) for health care to be seen as a public good, but we’re still out here making insurance company CEOs obscenely rich for who knows what reason.
Many American athletes do have access to the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s health insurance policy. But their eligibility for the program is up to their sport’s governing body, and an independent commission appointed by Congress found that “some of the most talented competitors under our flag go to sleep at night under the roof of a car or without sufficient food or adequate health insurance.” More than a quarter of U.S. athletes report earning less than $15,000 per year, and more than 40% said they paid out of pocket for healthcare, with an average cost of $9,200 per person. Only 16% said they’d been reimbursed.
Meanwhile, in 2022, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee had a net revenue of 61 million dollars and paid their CEO a salary of $1.1 million.
Also meanwhile, NBCUniversal sold $1.2 billion in advertising ahead of the last Olympic Summer Games in Tokyo and say that they have surpassed that number this year (though an exact figure has not been given).
This feels like a microcosm of exactly what is wrong with our whole economic set-up, especially with regard to the way we do our healthcare. We’ve got these people who, have been training and working their whole lives, living in poverty and then a bunch of other people making shit tons of wealth for themselves on the back of their labor — but it would be evil “socialism” to ask those people to pay just a little more in taxes so that those they are profiting off could have access to the healthcare they need. Take that logic a little farther and it applies to fast food or daycare workers, and what madness would that be?
On the bright-ish side, because of Ramsey’s videos, hundreds of other Olympic athletes have taken advantage of the free healthcare at Olympic Village that they might not otherwise get at home. So that’s nice for them!
The most heartbreaking thing about this is that we nearly did have a universal healthcare system. No, not back in 2008, I mean the 1970's. There was a very real chance we could have had a form of universal healthcare passed, but it became caught between President Carter's vacillation over how quickly it should be phased in and Ted Kennedy's hubris in believing that he could simply force a better option later. Then 1980 rolled around, and the rest was history.
Now every financial incentive in the post-Reagan world is geared towards our system as it currently is: from doctors who are paid twice what their European counterparts earn, to a parasitic healthcare insurance industry, to overly bloated hospital administrations, to a pharmaceutical industry that uses American consumers as its personal ATM. None of them want anything changed.
Ali Velshi, on MSNBC last week, passed on how his 81 year old dad in Canada had to go in for heart surgery, and all he had to pay for was parking.
That's how the rest of the world works.