It's a fact that Trump lies constantly. The first one I remember was when he lied about something he said during the presidential debate. During the live debate broadcast on many channels including Fox, Trump claimed that not paying taxes makes him smart. The next day when he was asked about it, again on national news, he denied he ever said it. It jarred me at the time, and I had no idea it was going to be his standard operating procedure. He provably lies all the time... and it doesn't seem to bother anyone that supports him. If he claims he's doing good things, why do they believe him when everyone else is saying that he's making things worse?
I meant that introduction to try to explain my political mindset so I could start this essay with the reader understanding me a little. I suppose my railing against Trump also gives a clear indication of my political views, but the conclusion of this essay was meant to be that Trump is awful and his supporters are being dumb to support him. So, I'm going to bring up issues that are important and that pretty much everyone has strong opinions on, and ask you (the reader) to think about the issue separate from politics and propaganda terms. I'm going to start with health care...
Health Care
Currently, each of us that has a job pays some amount from each pay check for health insurance. That money goes to a corporation. Then to use the insurance, you provide your information to a medical facility of some kind and you still pay a portion of the bill. The medical facility tries to get money from the insurance company, and for simple things like check ups, it's pretty likely it'll work okay. But do you have a story of a time you tried to get money from an insurance company and had to argue with them to get covered? Have you heard of others having a difficult time getting coverage? I understand that an insurance company wants to make sure that a big claim is not fraud, but think about what is happening...
You pay money every month. According to this website (https://www.ehealthinsurance.com/resources/affordable-care-act/much-health-insurance-cost-without-subsidy), the average family plan costs over $1100 per month. Some companies subsidize part of that cost, but if you get paid twice a month that means up to $550 per pay check. You can look at your own pay stub to see how much it is if the insurance is coming out of your check. If you're paying individual, you might be paying $100 to $200 a pay period.
What that money goes to is a company owned by a small number of people, with a small number of chief level officers. Lots of people are employed there, so the fact that it creates jobs is good. But, the money is not divided fairly. You already have the notion of insurance fighting to not cover big expenses. To be clear, you have been paying this insurance company likely for years, and possibly decades... possibly $1100 a month... for a total of tens of thousands of dollars. And insurance companies fight you when you need some of that money back.
While they're fighting you, the bigwigs in the company get million dollar bonuses on top of extravagant pay. The average CEO for example gets paid 300 times what the average normal employee gets. Three hundred times! According to this article... it's 361 times: https://aflcio.org/press/releases/ceo-pay-soars-361-times-average-worker. Average pay in this country is about forty-five thousand dollars a year. That would mean that the average CEO gets paid about sixteen MILLION dollars a year. Think about that money while you remember that insurance companies try to avoid covering people whenever possible. Sometimes there is fraud. I'm not going to deny that. I'm saying that insurance companies pay their CEOs a lot of money while at the same time fighting to not do what insurance is supposed to be for... and we have co-pays.
I have a personal story about health insurance companies that is relevant. I worked for a software subsidiary of one of the big health insurance companies a number of years ago. I have a clear memory of a year where we were told that the parent company was not doing well financially, so no one was getting a raise that year... not even a cost of living raise. It was that dire according to them. But when the public numbers were announced, the CEO got a bonus in the millions of dollars. A bonus. Millions of dollars. At the end of a year where we the employees were told the company wasn't doing well. I had someone try to explain that you have to do that to keep the CEO interested in working there... but... that's fucking ridiculous. The CEO is not doing a very good job if the company isn't doing well enough to give out cost of living raises. Why reward that? What were they doing with their really high pay? Why do they get millions in bonus when none of their employees get a cost of living raise?
What I'm trying to point out is that the health insurance industry is for-profit and it's something of a scam the way it is now. Do you agree? Do you agree that we pay a lot of money into a system that does what it can to deny us coverage (use of our own money) while lining the pockets of the people at the top with our money? Do you feel like it's good that the people at the top end up with millions or billions of dollars while their employees struggle? Or while you are the one giving the company that money? Would you choose to allocate the money that way? And do you like that because it's a for-profit industry, denying as much coverage as possible is how they increase their profits? Think about that motivation. The health insurance company who's purpose from our point of view is to help us with unexpected big medical costs so we don't end up bankrupt or in deep debt, actually has the purpose of making a profit for the owners.
So, do you like this system? Do you like the way things are now? What if I told you that you could use the same set up where money is taken from your pay check directly, but you'd pay less? What if I told you that in addition to you paying less, all those employees in the health insurance industry would have jobs... just for a different organization? And would it tickle you as much as it tickles me that the super-rich sacks of crap that have been scamming us for years would no longer have us as a source of income? How is that possible? Switch to government-run tax-funded health care.
The common complaints I've heard about such a thing...
- Where will you get the money?! Well, it's still coming from us, but we pay less to taxes, and save money by not paying the for-profit health insurance companies. The money comes from the same place, just goes through a different path and doesn't cost as much.
- But I don't want to pay for someone who is mooching off the system! I actually agree with the basic idea that I don't want to pay for a mooch. But I think there's an incorrect idea that all people who are currently unemployed are mooches. That's unfair. I've been unemployed before and was part of the statistic. I got unemployment pay and had the option of that cobra health insurance. But I found new jobs and got back into paying into the system. I've been paying health insurance companies and taxes since 1996 with only the small breaks of unemployment in there. I think you need to worry less about people mooching, and remember that you'll pay less for a government run tax-funded system regardless of mooches.
- But this is SOCIALISM! Yup. And? So what? Our police force is a government run tax-funded program too. So is the military. So are public schools. So are fire departments. So are road and bridge maintenance. Suggesting that an idea is bad because it fits the definition of socialism is dumb. Instead, look at the idea. Who cares if it fits a political term or not? I'm not suggesting we turn the United States into a big socialist country. That wouldn't work either. I'm suggesting we use socialist ideas when they're good. I'm happy to use capitalist ideas when they're good... but in the case of health care, the capitalist idea leaves us with incredibly rich people at the top charging us more than is necessary to provide a service that isn't as good as it should be. I prefer the good idea to the bad idea.
If we switch to health-care for all, run as a government program, we as citizens pay less money; get better service; AND there's this incredible added bonus that a poor family with a child that has a heart defect doesn't have to go into debt for the rest of their lives to save the child's life. I very much love the idea that the money I pay would go partly to helping people in real need.
I'll end the section on health care there. I hope you got something out of reading all of that. I think I'm going to make this its own blog post, and create another one for the next section. As I create more sections, I'll go back and edit links into each post. I think the next section will be about that salary gap I mentioned...
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