skip to main |
skip to sidebar
“Not all governments can snap their fingers and magically afford an emergency health response, let alone provide a basic income to cover citizens’ daily needs. That is the privilege of the US and its sturdy, tradable currency." David Adler and AndrĂ©s Arauz wrote in The Nation about the urgent need for the IMF to issue 3 trillion in Special Drawing Rights to assist Global South countries in a coronavirus-caused global economic downturn.
“The US government’s dollar support is not merely an act of solidarity; it preserves the stability of the global financial system,” Arauz says in a press release. “Financial panic in one part of the planet may infect the rest.” Arauz also discussed the appeal for #3trillionSDRnow in an interview with The Real News.
“The empowerment of Steve Mnuchin to utilize the Fed’s magnified buying powers to pick winners and losers is unprecedented in American history.”
Since the last CEPR News, the CARES Act has become law. This is the third pandemic emergency relief package since March 6. Eileen Appelbaum and Shawn Fremstad updated CEPR’s handy chart on what the bills include and what they still need. But CEPR’s work isn’t done just because the CARES Act is a done deal.
The three pandemic relief bills have focused CEPR’s work on two fronts. One, to continue to advocate for effective policies to mitigate the pain this crisis is causing people. Two, to vigilantly call out misuse of those funds.
Although there are relief provisions that will genuinely help those in desperate need, there are still trillions of dollars in Federal Reserve loans to be distributed under the direction of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, which is akin to, in the words of Jeff Hauser of CEPR’s Revolving Door Project, “facilitating a corporate coup ... He will have $4.2 trillion to extend to would-be corporate allies.”
The corporate vultures were circling before the ink was dry on the CARES Act, reports Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt. That same day the Act was signed, a private equity-owned hospital chain demanded, and received, emergency funds to bailout a hospital that was driven into financial distress by the very design of the PE business model - not because of pandemic-related overload.
Beyond the immediate focus on containing the virus and finding the necessary resources to treat people, CEPR is focused on policy responses that Congress should take during this crisis.
There is plenty of room for more economic policy options that can mitigate the impact of tens of millions of people losing their jobs, as Dean Baker explains here and here.
There is still not enough help for state and local governments, as economist Max Sawicky lays out here.
“Sanctions have severely limited [Iran’s] access to medicines and medical supplies”
“The Haitian government has few fiscal resources to draw upon in responding to the coronavirus pandemic, and Haitian families, many already pushed to the edge, are facing an increasingly perilous future,” Jake Johnston and Kira Paulemon write for Haiti: Relief and Reconstruction Watch.
Trump’s sanctions are making the coronavirus pandemic in Iran worse, and will likely hurt the ability of countries like Venezuela and North Korea to respond more effectively. Members of Congress should support Rep. Ilhan Omar’s bill that would curb executive branch use of sanctions, Alex Main writes at Al Jazeera English.
As Cuba sends doctors abroad to fight the coronavirus, “The [US] embargo has...negatively affected Cuba’s healthcare system by blocking imports of life-saving drugs and medical equipment patented in the United States,” Alex Main writes in the latest issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas.
BY TIM HIGGINBOTHAM
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/coronavirus-medicare-for-all-m4a-single-payer-health-insurance
The coronavirus crisis will lead to health insurance premium increases by up to 40 percent next year. We can’t afford that. Instead of seeing premiums skyrocket or bailing out private health companies, we need to seize this moment to abolish private insurance and create a single, national insurance plan.
The US health care system is going to be overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic for months to come. But when the spread of the virus finally does subside, many of its impacts will be here to stay. With millions of Americans likely to need expensive hospital stays this year, our nationwide health care costs are expected to increase by as much as $251 billion, according to a new analysis. As a result, US health insurance premiums could rise by up to 40 percent in 2021, exacerbating a crisis of ever-increasing costs that already leave Americans paying far more for care than the people of any other country.
What this means is that we’re about to hit a fork in the road with the private insurance industry. The coronavirus is shredding insurers’ profits right now, underlining the fact that private insurance is simply not built to handle a medical crisis. Having to cover a surge of expensive treatment — and, in some cases, having to waive co-pays — is antithetical to the premise of for-profit insurance. Saddled with these unexpected costs, private insurers’ only alternative to drastically raising our premiums will be to request a massive government bailout to avoid bankruptcy.
Allowing private companies to bankroll our health care system has always been a terrible policy choice, but the horror of this approach is about to become even more evident. Hiking premiums in the midst of a devastating pandemic to make up for their losses is an act of cruelty, to be sure. But it’s also the only logical act for companies whose sole purpose is to chase accrescent profits.
Instead of allowing our premiums to skyrocket or bailing out a heartless industry with public funds, thereby prolonging a profit-driven nightmare, we need to seize this watershed moment by taking the step many Americans have demanded for over a century. It’s time to abolish the private insurance industry and create a single, national insurance plan in its place.
Now Is the Time
There has never been a more obvious moment to take the leap to single-payer health care. The familiar arguments against it, disingenuous in the first place, are suddenly outwardly ridiculous and easy to refute.
Joe Biden has been using his scarce media appearances to assure viewers that he still opposes Medicare for All, Bernie Sanders’s popular single-payer plan that would comprehensively cover all Americans at no out-of-pocket cost. But his arguments — that Medicare for All would be too expensive, that it would disrupt people’s employer-sponsored coverage, and that it would bring too large a change from the status quo — no longer carry the weight they once did. Even CNN’s Anderson Cooper recently pressed Biden to explain how his health care plan would solve the problems made evident by the current pandemic.
On the question of cost, Sanders and his fellow Medicare for All advocates have long argued that single-payer health care will cost substantially less than our current system. This is backed up by virtually every major economic analysis of his plan, although these studies have long been ignored by Medicare for All’s opponents in Congress and the media. But they become harder to ignore the more expensive the current system gets — and a massive hike in premiums or a major government bailout will only underscore Sanders’s argument further.
As for the criticism that Medicare for All would throw people off their employer-sponsored insurance, it’s a bit more difficult to defend this argument when the country is projected to possibly reach its highest ever levels of unemployment. The major flaw in tethering health care to employment has never been clearer: workers are constantly at risk of losing their employer-sponsored insurance.
Now it’s happening on a mass scale — millions of Americans have already lost their jobs during the pandemic, and it’s only going to get worse.
Liberals have spent the last decade celebrating the fact that the Affordable Care Act lowered the number of uninsured people in the United States from 44 million to a still-astonishing 28 million. Suddenly, that modest improvement is being reversed. Because we’ve relied on a fragile method of coverage instead of a bulletproof approach of automatic, universal enrollment in a public plan, all of the progress made by liberals is subject to erasure by a single crisis.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to building the public demand for Medicare for All has been the mere fact that it will bring a major disruption to the status quo. The concept of socializing one-sixth of the US economy — which is what Medicare for All entails — has been used to frighten those wary of change.
But the pandemic has already disrupted the status quo. We no longer face a choice between keeping things as they were and implementing a major change. Change is coming, no matter what, and it’s our choice whether we respond to it by using public funds to prop up a broken system that constantly kills and bankrupts Americans in the name of profit, or by using those same funds to create a stable, single-payer program designed in the interest of public health.
Don’t Bail Out an Industry That Shouldn’t Exist
We’ve already tried bailouts. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was essentially a bailout in that it heavily subsidized insurance companies in order to get them to take measures that otherwise would not be sufficiently profitable. In fact, the government continues to pump hundreds of billions of public dollars each year into the industry to protect its profits.
It’s a broken approach no matter the scale. But what’s coming will be massive — it will make the ACA subsidies look incredibly meager. We cannot allow such a historic bailout of an industry that should not exist in the first place.
The logical fix to the problems of our health care system has always been to implement a single, national insurer. Instead of profit, we need to prioritize public health and well-being. Even when we’re not facing such a monumental crisis, our current system causes millions to suffer, physically and financially.
But this crisis has brought us to a unique crossroads. With our health care providers crying out for the help they need, with millions finding themselves suddenly uninsured, and with the insurance industry proving itself fundamentally incapable of protecting public health, we have the opportunity to choose a better way.
It’s long past time for single-payer health care. We’ve been demanding it for more than a century — people have fought their entire lives and died without ever seeing it become a reality. But we’ve never had a moment quite like this, where the flaws and shortcomings of our long-standing multi-payer system are so abundantly clear.
So let’s make our demand even clearer: instead of bailing out the industry that murders and bankrupts us and our families, let’s erase the industry altogether and take health coverage into public hands through a Medicare for All, single-payer program.
