(The following was written by someone contributing to my blog who wants to remain anonymous)
I know that people are afraid of Medicare for all, that having private insurance provides more or better healthcare or that it is cheaper.
I have had medicare since I was 30 and not once did it ask me to pay up for my healthcare. MY Medicare, traditional medicare, only pays 80% of my medical bills however (as opposed to the 100% promised by Medicare for All) so as a very low income recipient, I was granted Medicaid to pay the other 20%.
Now that I am a senior, and thanks to inherited funds am no longer mired in poverty, I am also no longer eligible for Medicaid, But my Medigap plan F must pay that necessary 20%.
Medicare has paid for my clinic visits, hospital stays, every doctor I’ve ever seen (except for the few who did not accept insurance). It has paid for my X-rays and MRIs and colonoscopy and an operation. It has paid for physical therapy and joint injections. It has paid for my vision therapy, with its weekly appointments for more than a year.
There’s nothing not to like. And I like it all. What I would LOVE from Medicare for All, is not having to find a way to pay for plan F (no co-pays), dental care, and vision care complete with refraction and the special very expensive glasses I need to wear to see. Hearing care is or will eventually become necessary for many of us. Dental care!
If EVERYONE is in the pool, and it is funded appropriately, all of this is possible. I know, because most European countries already do this and much more cheaply than the 16% of GDP which is what the U.S. pays.
I don’t understand the opposition to Medicare for All, when so many millions have no health care at all, and many more are under-insured with “copper” plans or no Medigap or Medicaid, so any major illness would drown them in debt. We all die, and most of us will spend, or have spent on us, many thousands during our final years. Most of us will not die suddenly, in the perfect bloom of health. So what gives? Unless you are a healthcare insurance executive or employee, in which case you have your job to worry about, I do not understand why you would want private insurance or anything less than Medicare for All.
WAGblog: Dum Spiro Spero 
Okay we’re in business!
But it is now too late for me to stay up and comment at length. I’m shocked that no Americans have commented. But I’m happy for my friends down under! Thank you!
Cabrogal, I need to go into the blog to get your email but if you see this before I do so, please tell the story you offered to. The other version. My email is my full name at gmail.com, no spaces etc.
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Weirdly enough I cannot comment or like anything on my own blog…what gives, WordPress? This is a test before I pen a lengthy comment that does not take.
Phoebe
(Great, it has me at blogger! An old old blog!)
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BTW, here’s a somewhat abstracted summary of how we presented to the Commission (though it’s really about me rejoining my old activist mob).
If you want a more literal version of what was said drop me an email and I’ll send you the link.
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Yeah, my arguments to the Australian Productivity Commission were a bit more nuanced than “throw more money at mental healthcare”, on account of the coercion in the system making the whole thing abusive. I called increasing funding without reining in abuse “just spreading the poison”.
Mostly I was attacking the mental healthcare we have but I had some kind words for Soteria style stabilising homes and Open Dialogue style community reintegration approaches.
Psychiatry is going through one of its crises now and is set to change a lot (though not improve, if history is the guide) but I don’t think just getting rid of it will help. It’s just a manifestation of something that arises from how we run our societies.
A few centuries ago it would have been clothed in ‘theology’ and clerical garb instead of ‘science’ and a doctor’s coat but it was there. As long as we need scapegoats to project our wider problems onto we need an authority who will legitimise them as targets and hide them away where we don’t have to be embarrassed by how we go about ‘saving their souls’. The main innovation of the current regime has been methods for keeping them locked away in their own heads. Not every family has an attic.
Kill psychiatry and something very similar will grow in its place, though probably in more fashionable garb.
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Yes I’m an Aussie, we aren’t bad people, which I think most people in general are good, we just have a horrible government – like most other countries. Maybe if we keep complaining thought something will be done, my experience of the mental health system is limited but unremarkable, my experience of state care and the penal system is horrendous, those too need a compete rethink. Keep up the struggle!
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i lové that it is my two Aussie readers — if i’m not mistaken? — who have commented here! thank you! yes i agree that there seems to be a general rightward trend which makes no sense since most of us are not billionaires and frankly would be much better served by the left!
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It’s a shocking thing that people see universal healthcare as paying someone else’s bills, I think it’s a terrible side effect of how we are slipping towards the right. Surely the first thing our countries should spend money on is the health of its citizens?
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“is there any” blah blah blah! it is hard to correct when commenting by phone so please forgive any hasty or phone induced errors of grammar!
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hey! thanks for the comment … it does seem a no-brainer but here we still argue whether healthcare is a basic right or merely a privilege in society. That question could indeed be answered by looking at almost every other so-called western government (is there any left who do not provide healthcare as a basic right?
The post did not mention mental health care or psychiatry and i’m on the fence as to whether it should be included myself. On the one hand, people have always had problems we consigned to the “nervous” or “mental” capacity but i don’t see thst treating it as a health condition has done the world any good . i do think good counselors are important but not the diagnoses they presently need to get paid… for the writer and myself we see a different model that might emerge if psychiatry were not actually compensated — it might die a necessary death so a new paradigm can emerge.
my best to you,
phoebe
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I don’t get why this is even up for discussion in the US.
Look at every other healthcare system in the civilised world.
Now look at yours.
I’ve spent the past week complaining to Australian funding authorities about how mental healthcare is resourced here, but when I look across the Pacific it’s hard to see what I’m complaining about.
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