Every year, 20,000 Americans die from a lack of access to healthcare. Almost 50 million people in this country have no insurance. With unemployment skyrocketing and costs continuing to spiral upwards, things will only get worse for us. In the richest country in the history of the world, this is completely unacceptable.

The U.S. healthcare system is totally dysfunctional and the crisis goes far beyond the uninsured. Tens of millions more are under-insured and under-serviced by companies that often refuse care for “pre-existing” conditions or serious illnesses. Yet, the U.S. spends two times more than any other country per capita on healthcare. A Harvard study found that more than half of all personal bankruptcies in 2007 were due to medical bills and three-quarters of them were insured.

Obama’s Plan
President Obama has declared “the stars are aligned” for sweeping reform in 2009. But, can the system really be fixed without rooting out the private, for-profit insurance companies who make massive profits off healthcare and often deny us coverage?

Obama wants to tax the wealthiest five percent of Americans to fund a massive spending increase on healthcare, slash rapidly rising costs through voluntary reductions from private insurance companies, and create a “public plan option” as an alternative to private, for-profit insurance.
At the beginning of May, representatives of insurance companies joined Obama in a press conference announcing a joint effort to reduce costs. But, behind the scenes many insurance giants are working to derail even these limited efforts, just as they derailed President Clinton’s efforts at reform in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, the insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants make billions of dollars in profits. Politicians often say that there is “not enough money” for quality healthcare and other social services like education, housing and jobs. Yet, trillions were readily available to bailout the big banks.

Insurance Companies – Still Bad for Your Health
At stake for the insurance companies is their gravy train of profits. But something far more important is at stake for working people – the very health of our families and future generations.
These companies claim reform would lead to inefficiency and poor care, but the reality is that their system is the most wasteful in the industrialized world. In the U.S., 31 percent of all healthcare dollars go to bureaucracy and administration often paying for things such as lawyers whose job is to figure out how NOT to pay claims.

A major study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Public Citizen in 2004 estimated that under a national health insurance system $286 billion annually could be saved in administrative costs alone – enough to cover all the uninsured and all out-of-pocket prescription drug costs, with more than a $150 billion left over to spend building more hospitals, training more doctors and nurses, and providing more jobs in the process.

The only practical first step towards this sort of savings is passing legislation for a single payer system as proposed by House Resolution 676. This would create a Canadian-style healthcare system, eliminating the private, for-profit insurance companies from the equation. Everyone would have insurance. Hospitals would be funded similar to fire departments or schools. They would not have to battle hundreds of private, for-profit insurance companies over thousands of bills everyday for things as small as band-aids.

Public Plan Option?
Any reform that fails to eliminate the private, for-profit insurance companies as a first step will fail to significantly reduce costs and provide quality coverage for all. Obama’s plan to provide a “public plan option” that is supported by many union leaders as an alternative to single payer is not an alternative for working families.

According to Dr. David Himmelstein of Physicians for a National Health Plan, an organization of 16,000 doctors in the U.S. advocating for a single payer, “[A]s long as multiple private plans coexist with the public plan, hospitals and doctors would have to maintain their costly billing and internal cost tracking apparatus.” (www.pnhp.org).

Build a Movement
Healthcare should be a right and not a means for making massive profits. But how can we end for-profit healthcare?

Every progressive step forward in this country has been the result of mass struggles by ordinary Americans. Voting rights for women, workplace rights, and civil rights were not handed to us by the good will of a few politicians. They were concessions delivered as a result of an increasingly politicized, organized and mobilized population.

In the next few months, advocacy groups and union leaders are mobilizing for a series of demonstrations across the country demanding reform. Working people everywhere should energetically participate in these protests. This is an important starting point. Unfortunately, many of these campaigns are not explaining the deficiencies of Obama’s plan. Unless these demonstrations start putting forward a clear call for free quality health care for all under a single payer plan, there is a serious risk of legislation emerging that fails working families and serves to protect the parasitic role of insurance companies.

Supporters of single payer should take advantage of these protests and the discussion that has opened up, to explain our case, and strive to build a mass movement that clearly demands an end to for-profit healthcare.

The Role of the Democrats
While Obama and the Democratic Party have taken some steps towards opening a discussion about the need for universal healthcare, we cannot rely on them to deliver the healthcare system we need. The Democrats pose as a party of the people, but in reality they are a party beholden to the interests of big business. At a time when millions have lost their jobs and homes they have given $12 trillion in handouts and loan guarantees to Wall Street.

Obama has enormous popular support in the country and the Democrats now have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Several studies have shown that a majority of Americans support a single payer healthcare system. However, Obama’s presidential campaign and the Democrats accepted millions from the private health care companies. Nancy-Ann DeParle, a healthcare industry insider, was appointed to head the administration’s reform effort.

Obama and the Democratic Party’s real loyalties have been exposed by the fact that while calling for an inclusive discussion on reform, supporters of single payer have been excluded again and again.

Democratic Party Senator Max Baucus recently headed a public hearing on health care reform. A group of thirteen doctors were arrested when they asked for single payer supporters to be included in the discussion. According to opensecrets.org, Baucus has received more than $1 million in campaign contributions from the healthcare industry. Donations to all the politicians on the Senate committee that he heads total more than $5 million from insurance companies alone.

Need for Independent Politics
Ultimately, a free, universal, quality healthcare system will only be conceded to us if we get out there and protest. A majority of working class people support single payer health care. We need to use our massive numbers and power to politically challenge both parties of big business, both in the streets and at the ballot. We need to organize protests with a clear demand for free, quality healthcare for all. We also need to start running our own candidates and ultimately build our own party, not as another electoral machine, but as a fighting party of working people, youth and the poor.

Rather than leaving a public healthcare system at the mercy of an unaccountable bureaucracy of big business politicians, we need a health care system that is democratically controlled by the wider public. Patients, doctors, nurses and healthcare workers should be making healthcare decisions not the insurance companies. Socialists also call for the public ownership and democratic control of the pharmaceutical industries and other industries that so massively affect our health.

Build an Alternative to Healthcare-for-Profit
The failure of the for-profit healthcare system demonstrates the inevitable problems of organizing our society according to the needs of profit, putting the interests of the big corporations and banks ahead of the needs of working people and the environment.

The recent collapse of the financial system and this deep recession has exposed the failure of the capitalist system. Help us build a movement for free, universal healthcare, and join Socialist Alternative in the struggle to end the rule of profit over our society by building for a socialist future for all.

Take the Profit Out of Sickness!