Medicare-for-All "Socialism" Is Just Another Racket

November 15, 2019

The entire system of health needs to be re-organized from the ground up, and funding the rackets will only speed the collapse of the system.

The core problem with "socialist" proposals such as Medicare-for-All is that they don't actually fix what's broken--they just expand existing rackets such as the healthcare/sickcare racket, the higher education racket, and so on.

Let's start by separating "real socialism" (state ownership of the means of production) from "faux socialism" (the state borrows trillions of dollars to fund self-serving public-private rackets).

The basic idea of classic socialism is that state ownership of the means of production enables the state to harvest the surplus production and invest it in the public good. If the state is organized as a democracy, then the public gets a say in defining "the public good" and changing course if the national surplus is being mal-invested or diverted into the hands of the few under the guise of "the public good."

What's being labeled "socialist" in present-day U.S.A. is nothing more than the state borrowing from future generations to fund profiteering rackets today. It's hardly a secret that the U.S. spends twice as much per person on healthcare but trails the pack of other developed nations in actual health. (See infographic below for the facts, which I have discussed here for 14 years.)

Problem #1 is robust health isn't profitable, while managing chronic lifestyle diseases and pushing needless/harmful medications and procedures are immensely profitable.

Problem #2 is the external costs of destructive but oh-so-profitable products are not paid by either producers or consumers at the point of purchase. The tobacco industry offers an example of this decoupling of "price discovery" and externalities that manifest years or decades later.

Selling tobacco was and is an enormously profitable venture, but only because the full costs of tobacco use manifest many years after the products are purchased and consumed, and these costs do not fall on the tobacco producers but on the consumers (who suffer terrible health consequences and early death), and on the healthcare system and society at large, which must absorb the staggering direct cost of dealing with the diseases caused by tobacco addiction and the indirect costs of lost productivity and early death.

For every $1 of profit the tobacco companies earned, $100 of future external costs were imposed on the consumers of tobacco and society at large. If the full external costs were levied at the point of sale, tobacco would be extremely expensive, and if the true risks had been advertised as heavily as the products themselves, the tobacco companies' liability exposure would have made the packaging and selling of tobacco an unprofitable business.

To maintain profitability, the tobacco companies engaged in a decades-long campaign to mask the real-world health consequences of using their products. The goal was three-fold: hide the well-known consequences of tobacco addiction, maintain that tobacco wasn't addictive, and maintain that it wasn't unhealthy, decoupling the sale of tobacco from the eventual costs.

The same dynamic is in play with America's food industry. Garbage in, garbage out: garbage "food" in, garbage health out.

This plays perfectly into sickcare's PR, which is that there is a magic handful of oh-so-profitable pills one can swallow to "fix" all the disorders caused by a garbage diet and near-zero fitness. And in case your doctor didn't adequately explain the wunnerful benefits of the magic handful of oh-so-profitable pills, Big Pharma helpfully spends billions of dollars on ads to promote a magical-thinking belief that some new med or procedure will "fix" complex, inter-connected metabolic disorders created by poor diet and an absence of fitness.

Medicare-for-All is simply a way to fund the racket as painlessly as possible, which is to borrow from future generations to fund profiteering rackets in Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Packaged Food/Fast Food, and so on--the equivalents of Big Tobacco.

Just as smokers were encouraged to kill themselves without being aware of the eventual consequences of tobacco addiction, consumers of highly processed foods are killing themselves without being aware of the eventual consequences.

The promoters of Medicare-for-All offer a Band-Aid to fund the racketeering nature of U.S. healthcare: we're gonna tax the billionaires and they'll pay for the racket. It would be comical if it wasn't so painfully obvious that in our pay-to-play political circus, any new tax bill will be larded with exceptions and loopholes.

Let's say the "tax the rich" proposals raise $50 billion -- woohoo. But this is a drop in the bucket of additional costs incurred by Medicare-for-All, which could easily top $500 billion a year.

Nobody pushing Medicare-for-All dares connect the dots between garbage in, garbage out lifestyles and an unsustainably costly healthcare system of gargantuan waste, fraud, shameless profiteering, needless/harmful med and procedures, etc., a system which consumes twice as much money per person as our developed-world competitors for a measure of national health that is, if we're honest with ourselves (gasp), actually declining.

The entire system of health needs to be re-organized from the ground up, and funding the rackets will only speed the collapse of the system.

U.S. Healthcare Spending, courtesy of Peter G. Peterson Foundation

Will You Be Richer or Poorer? Profit, Power and A.I. in a Traumatized World (Kindle $6.95, print $11.95) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($6.95 (Kindle), $12 (print), $13.08 ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).


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