Through the States
The Canadian Strategy for Passing Universal Healthcare
The article “Medicare for None: A Response to the State-Based Universal Health Care Act of 2021” (Common Dreams May, 29, 2021) misses the bill’s point. The article claims that Congressman Ro Khanna’s bill will cause the Balkanization of Medicare, but in reality, the bill will provide the framework for saving tens of thousands of lives, preventing countless bankruptcies, and providing relief for the working class from the predatory for-profit insurance system.
The approach of sitting around waiting for the federal government to do something on Medicare-for-All is a failure. No matter how progressive an administration we manage to elect through our excessively undemocratic election process, our system of minority rule will likely stymie any kind of transformational legislation. There will always be representatives like Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to block it for whatever reason.
Thousands of health insurance lobbyists are waiting to extinguish any bills that threaten profits. Our government is essentially a fiefdom of big money interests and what they want is what we get, and they will never allow such a thing as an improved Medicare-for-All. Someday, we may get another progressive administration, another FDR, with the moral and political courage to lead but this could be decades away, and this is time struggling families don’t have. For the foreseeable future, the Democratic party as a whole is too worried about being labeled as “socialists,” to even think about passing improved Medicare-for-All.
This leaves it to the states. If the states are laboratories of Democracy, then let them press forward. Gay marriage started in Vermont with civil unions, moved across the country and is now enshrined in national law. And now, look at cannabis. States like Washington and Colorado finally had enough of using taxpayer money to build more prisons because of the racist drug laws that the feds use as another form of Jim Crow. Now legalization is spreading across the nation. Someday, the Federal government will inevitably follow suit.
Several states are now trying to break the chokehold of private insurance on our healthcare. Yet, these efforts have also been constricted by complex federal laws. This is what the “State-Based Universal Health Care Act of 2021” is all about. Rep. Khanna’s bill “provides states with historic access to federal funding streams and regulatory flexibility necessary to implement and support affordable, universal health care plans.” [read more]
States will be able to stop the privatization of Medicare via Rep. Khanna’s bill, by providing 100% coverage, including prescriptions, vision and dental benefits. In this way, states can end insurance companies’ nefarious schemes, via supplemental plans, to profit off the limitations of present day Medicare. Finally, by expanding Medicare’s coverage to be more like state Medicaid plans which are far superior than federal Medicare, states will help fight against the newest, neoliberal narrative that “Medicare isn’t great, so we shouldn’t have Medicare for All.”
Contrary to the arguments by some in the single payer movement, Rep. Ro Khanna’s bill won’t have a negative impact on benefits. In fact, the State-Based Universal Health Care Act requires benefits provided under state plans to be equal to or greater than what federal beneficiaries in those states receive now.
Whole Washington, for example, is one state effort to ensure everyone in Washington has gold standard healthcare, at a much reduced cost to working class families. The Whole Washington Health Trust is modeled after the national Medicare-for-All bill: no deductibles, covering vision and dental, and with funding mechanisms that would assist in balancing the regressive tax system in Washington. In fact, Washington State has the most regressive tax system in the United States, allowing 14 billionaires like Jeff Bezos to pay zero income tax while the 99% suffer under ever rising property and sales taxes.
Unfortunately, the Democratic Chairs of the Washington State healthcare committees, Rep. Eileen Cody and Sen. Annette Cleveland, have never let a real universal healthcare bill out of committee. Not coincidentally they take tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from health insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Instead, they took the usual politically safe passage out of the issue that makes it appear like they are doing something: studies and commissions. This is why Whole Washington has been preparing a ballot measure to take the issue to the people. If you live in Washington, be sure to pledge to sign the petition and, if you can, join their organization by volunteering. Just as Canada passed their single payer system province by province, so can we pass universal healthcare starting with one state!
Opinion co-written by Walter Carpenter & Jen Nye
