Health care for people… or for corporate profits?

When grassroots groups rise up against the corporate establishment to try winning some specific progressive changes for the common good, […]

When grassroots groups rise up against the corporate establishment to try winning some specific progressive changes for the common good, the odds against them can seem daunting. As an old saying puts it: Where there’s a will… there are 1,000 won’ts.

That’s certainly been the case in the decades-long political struggle to ensure that every man, woman, and child in our country gets decent health care as a human right. Today, even though we Americans pay by far the highest price for health care, most people are denied that right by our country’s profiteering, corporate-run medical industry, which treats care as a privileged commodity.

So many families are left out and maltreated by this dysfunctional system that more than 70 percent of Americans (including a majority of Republicans) now support replacing it with a “Medicare for All” publicly-financed system that provides full health coverage for everyone, even as it saves us money.

So here came 1,000 screaming plutocratic won’ts, trying to crush the people’s will. But the present system is so bad and public support for Medicare for All has grown so large that the usual corporate dismissal of such ideas wasn’t working.

Spooked, the won’ts met secretly in downtown Washington to set up the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a PR/lobbying juggernaut. Of course, what they “care” about is the future of their ripoff profits, and they’ve committed hundreds of millions of dollars and hired an army of more than 200 lobbyists to pound the public and Congress with a nuclear level of propaganda and raw political deceit.

This is Washington politics at its worst – a handful of cynical self-interests using cloaks, dark money, and lies to rig the system for corporate profits at the expense of human health and political morality.

“Your Insurance Is Getting Disrupted – With or Without Medicare for All,” New York Magazine, April 8, 2019.

“Lobbies’ Greatest Ally in the Effort to Sabotage Health Care Reform,” Truth Dig, January 28, 2020.