Price gouging consumers during this pandemic seems to be an acceptable practice for pharmaceutical companies. This shameless greed to overprice COVID-19 drugs is unethical and dangerous.  These medications should be available to everyone at a reasonable cost.

Dr. Gordon Mosser examines the cost of healthcare under our current system as it relates to the pandemic and our social unrest.  His article explains why he is more convinced than ever that the time for Medicare for All is now, and his research reflects his belief why we cannot allow fear of the unknown become an obstacle for its implementation. 

No health system is perfect, however healthcare in the United States has been failing us miserably during this pandemic. People are afraid to go to the doctor because they can't afford it and don't want to face debt,  or even worse, bankruptcy.  Our current for-profit system is broken and dangerous. 

A new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation highlights how between 25 -43 million workers could lose their health insurance as they begin losing their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Many American workers receive their health insurance through their employers and with so many of them now being laid off, the question is What Will They Do? 

A frequent assertion by the commercial health insurance industry, echoed by mainstream media and many candidates, is the need for greater 'choice' of private health insurance. However, experience demonstrates that 'choice' remains with insurers, who arbitrarily drop unprofitable plans, medicines, doctors and hospitals, too often leaving the insured high and dry. Insurers can and do choose to cover the healthy, more profitable clients, and drop the sick. Insurance science proves that a single large risk pool insurance like traditional Medicare is much more actuarially sound and financially sustainable than multiple administratively complex small risk pool commercial insurers.

Imagine this staggering fact:  The United States is now spending $2,497 per person on health administrative costs, or 5 times more than Canada spends.  This data was gleaned from the recent Annals of Internal Medicine report published on January 7, 2020

The sheer number of billing abuses by Medicare Advantage plans is overwhelming and tax payers are paying the price, literally.  Sick patients are being charged higher rates than healthy ones, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)

Sen. Michael Bennet is one of the Democratic Party’s chief mouthpieces for private insurance, promoting “Medicare X,” a plan that maintains private health insurance as its centerpiece. As a major recipient of money from insurance, PhARMA, hospitals and other segments of the medical industrial complex, Bennet adopts many of industry’s talking points, as former insurance executive and whistle blower Wendell Potter describes in this February 11, 2019 article that will continue to resonate into the coming year and months of presidential campaigning.

Private health insurers seek to defund and privatize traditional Medicare by supplanting it with the much less efficient, more costly, Medicare Advantage Plans that are paid tens of billions of dollars in extra subsidies annually. This piece by American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), representative of private insurers, thanks 368 Congress members for their “strong bipartisan” advocacy for enrollment of those over 65 in Medicare Advantage Plans. Even Congress members who ostensibly support “Medicare-for-All,” have endorsed AHIP’s letter effectively promoting privatization of Medicare. Most of Colorado’s delegation, Democrats & Republicans, have signed. Check to see if your representatives signed - let them know that privatizing Medicare by replacing it with Medicare Advantage is the wrong way to go.

February 7, 2019