Opinion by: Krystal Ball
In new comments, Andrew Yang has clarified his position on Medicare-for-All.
So he says he agrees with the spirit of Bernie’s Medicare-for-All plan but calls getting rid of private insurance over a short period of time “a bit too disruptive. I would not do it.” Now, yesterday I tweeted that I found the comments disappointing and I do. But I heard your pushbacks on social media yesterday and wanted to explain a little more about why I think this positioning is a mistake and ultimately inconsistent with Andrew’s overall worldview.
First of all, if you really believe automation is causing and will continue to cause massive job loss, disrupting the job market in a 4th industrial revolution, few things are more critical to addressing that problem than making sure every person has good healthcare and shifting away from our outdated and nonsensical employer-based system. One of the things that I really like about the freedom dividend is well, the freedom part. The idea that it puts power in the hands of every American to say screw you to an abusive employer or soul crushing job. Not that $1,000 a month is a panacea but it’s a little bit of a cushion, a little bit of a rebalancing of the scales so that people can feel emboldened to pursue work they actually find meaningful rather than just the work that is most likely to keep them from starving.
Andrew clearly understands that in a wealthy society like ours, scarcity is a myth, poverty is a societal choice, and it’s used as a tool for social control. If people are terrified of being homeless and hungry, they’ll put up with a schedule that has them closing the store at 1 am and then coming back to open it up at 5 am all with barely any notice. They’ll put up with a corporate overlord that treats them as disposable cogs rather than living breathing humans with lives and hopes and dreams. They’ll put up with the wage theft that plagues the overwhelming majority of working class non-union jobs. They’ll be too afraid of the retribution that will come if they try to organize their fellow workers in a union. As far as I can tell, Andrew’s whole campaign is based around reducing that terror of poverty so that workers have more power and control over their own lives. Well nothing would be more powerful in giving service workers, blue collar workers, and white collar workers alike the power to say, “F you” to an awful situation than knowing that they and their family have good healthcare, not tied to their employer, and not dependent on a predatory market, no matter what they do. This is in fact one of the core reasons i’m so passionate about Medicare-for-All because of what it means for worker power.
I mean, today, how many people do you know who are working in a particular job when they would otherwise retire or do something entrepreneurial or creative or stay home with their kids, just so they can have the health insurance? I personally know quite a few. There’s nothing about that dynamic that I want to preserve or prolong.
Which brings me to my second point here. Andrew raises as a concern the disruption of getting rid of private insurance. I get that. But two things. First, there is a massive amount of disruption in our system as it exists. Disruption when people lose their jobs. Disruption when they change jobs. Disruption when their employer just decides to change their coverage.
For example, just this week, the Washington Post decided to push their employers into a higher cost, greater risk plan, something that those employees did not want or ask for. It was in a word, disruptive!
I’m not saying that moving to a single payer system will be easy but there is nothing about our current high cost, low quality, profit driven, sickness industry that is worth preserving. Every year that we delay means people being denied care by insurers who are always scheming ways to make a fatter profit, another year of families paying insane costs that break their budget, another year of people literally dying for lack of decent care. You want to talk about disruption? The current system is practically designed to disrupt lives and this is where I think Andrew and I have a fundamental philosophical difference. And this brings me to the second piece here. He speaks of creating a government health care system that is so good the private insurers basically close up shop.
The problem is that whole idea places an incredible amount of faith in markets. Faith that I simply don’t share. It assumes that consumers will have perfect information and not be manipulated by millions of dollars in ad-buys and other tactics designed to misinform and deceive. Do we really believe that health insurers will just look at the government plan and say, well ya got us! Well played. We’ll just stop our sickness profiteering and go open a yoga studio or something. Just consider the opioid crisis where pharmaceutical companies lied to the FDA, lied to doctors, spent millions upon millions pushing their life destroying drugs and ultimately created the worst addiction crisis in our nation’s history. Or consider the foreclosure crisis where Americans were deceived into taking on mortgages that they had no hope of paying. Or consider the university system where sleazy for-profit institutions make big promises to students and leave them nothing but a massive debt load.
There are simply some areas of basic human dignity that capitalism should be kept completely clear of and health care is decidedly one of them. These things can seem very complicated but at bottom it’s quite simple. You either have a health care system that is about care or you have one that is about profit. America is sick because today, people profit off of sickness. And yes, I dearly want to disrupt that current model. Andrew’s campaign has been built around the possibility of transformation. Around tackling our biggest problems in a transformational way. I hope he will take that attitude of revolutionary possibility and apply it to the healthcare space as well. Because the freedom dividend will not deliver without the freedom to have good healthcare no matter your job status.
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