Posted on 11/08/2019 5:08:33 AM PST by Kaslin
The health care industry employs more Americans than any other—more than manufacturing, more than retail. The 18 million health-care employees include 2.3 million who work for the health insurance industry. The focus of most analysis of Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All proposal has been on the extent and incidence of the taxes that will pay for it. But there’s another even more important way to consider it: the Massachusetts senator has just proposed, in a stroke, to upend a huge industry and the lives of all those who work in it. She has drafted them, willing or not, to serve her vision of the common good.
Perhaps that will be how it turns out. But the history of the Left suggests another scenario: the sacrifice of complex, functioning human systems at the feet of an idea. In his masterwork, Life and Fate, the Soviet-era novelist Vassily Grossman describes a not entirely different situation: the effect of the collectivization of agriculture in the early days of the Soviet Union. Individual ownership of small farmland was adjudged inefficient. Collective farms would lay the groundwork for industrialization by freeing rural labor to migrate to cities. There would be no choice involved, though. Any peasants, or kulaks, who owned livestock or stored grain would be forced to relinquish them along with their land.
Grossman describes what happened, through the eyes of a Bolshevik who believed that “communist agricultural labor would bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. During the period of all-out collectivization, he had seen special trains packed with the families of kulaks. He had seen exhausted men and women fall into the snow never to rise again. He had seen ‘closed’ villages where every door and window was boarded up and there wasn’t a living soul in sight.” Mass executions claimed as many as 600,000 kulaks. Artificial famine, the historian Robert Conquest has estimated, may have claimed 5 million lives. All in the service of uprooting a deeply seated system, root and branch, in the service of a projected good.
Senator Warren, of course, proposes to save lives through access to health care, not to take them—although the history of rationing of care in public systems gives one pause. This is not to assert that Stalin’s purge of the kulaks is the moral equivalent of Medicare for All. It is, however, to point out the underlying commonality on the Left: a willingness to wipe away complex systems by government fiat, without the humility of acknowledging that millions of people have based their lives and careers on the existing system. It is one thing to make incremental change, quite another to hit restart.
Yet this is indeed the way of the Left—the link between the hard socialism of state ownership and the softer socialism of “social democracy.” Examples abound. Warren has also proposed, for instance, to end hydraulic fracturing—fracking—for gas and oil on day one of her presidency. It depends who is counted, but one estimate places the number of employees in that industry at more than 10 million. Many have uprooted their households to move to Texas, Oklahoma, and North Dakota to seek their fortune. And there are spinoffs, such as the huge plastic “cracking” plants under construction near once-struggling Pittsburgh to turn natural gas into the components of plastics. All gone on day one? All for the asserted common good of keeping fossil fuels in the ground.
Indeed, even Warren’s casual attacks on “giant corporations”—and proposals to sharply increase the corporate tax rate—evidence an indifference to how difficult it is to build and sustain such organizations, which she blithely demonizes. And, of course, the numbers of Americans employed by this allegedly toxic octopus, as well as the number of investors who rely on their dividends to sustain their retirements, dwarfs even those who work in the health care sector.
Other Democratic candidates have toyed with similar broad-brush changes—as when the now-defunct campaign of Beto O’Rourke proposed to revoke the tax-exempt status of religious institutions that refused to perform same-sex marriages. (Warren, to her credit, demurred.) The idea of picking and choosing which religions should get the blessing of the state is a profound departure in the American experiment, blithely proposed.
We’ve seen this before. The eminent domain policies of postwar urban renewal literally cleared vibrant, if low-income, neighborhoods, whose alleged “blight” offended the sensibilities of middle-class planners. Thousands of homes and small businesses were cleared to make way for public housing, a failed experiment that present-day Democratic Socialists hope to revive. Indeed, even earlier, the Progressive vision of local zoning wiped away a system of legal agreements that helped build neighborhoods with a mix of housing types we (even Progressives) envy today.
In the vision of the contemporary Left, we are all at risk of becoming kulaks, sacrificed for a vision of the collective good, our plans upended, our life choices endangered. Such is the subtext of Medicare for All.
Just look at the numbers: We have 2.3 million people employed in a health insurance industry. These people don't treat a single illness or injury, don't work in a support function in a hospital or medical office that does treat patients, and provide no value to the health care industry or its clients/customers.
On the one hand, I get the author’s point. On the other hand, there was no divine institution of Jobs in Health Insurance. There was a time when “health insurance” was not a thing, and nobody worked in that industry.
If a different way of paying for medical products and services evolved from the free market, health-insurance industry jobs would become obsolete, just as have many agricultural jobs, many manufacturing jobs, etc.
There is a middle ground between the government’s eliminating industries by fiat and the government’s trying to keep every current job in existence. The middle ground would be a free market.
In my opinion, the mythical Medicare for All system would employ just as many people as are currently in the industry. Government talk about efficiencies is always utter nonsense; the demand for the spoils overwhelms any good intentions.
Years ago I worked with a Chinese woman who had a tendency to laugh at inappropriate times. I’m told this is a Chinese thing which is intended to cover feelings of awkwardness or discomfort. FWIW she was probably born in the mid or late 1950s. She would have been a young child during China’s Great Leap Forward.
We were talking about pumpkins. She mentioned that China had a lot of pumpkins, which surprised me because I think of big round, orange pumpkins as being very American. But she assured me that pumpkins were grown all over China.
“My grandfather was famous for growing pumpkins” she said. “He grew more pumpkins than anyone else in our village.”
Then she added: “That’s why they killed him.” And then she laughed.
This is exactly how the Left operates.
They see some simplified notion that "sounds good" without any real understanding of what is involved.
Then they blythely propose gigantic changes without any consideration of the enormous harm they are doing, based on their assumptions.
Only constraints on government prevent them from doing enormous harm.
They hate constraints on government with a passion.
You are falling for the same fallacy as Warren. Someone has to track expenditures, income, and treatments. There has to be administration.
I believe it would be much better done with the market, instead of the heavy hand of the government, which now exists.
But, those 2.3 million will not be eliminated in a government system. They would be replaced with 5 million government bureaucrats.
One of the biggest problems with our system is the lack of connection between the purchaser of health products and the providers.
When Japanese garrisons were cut off from their supplies on isolated Pacific Islands bypassed by the Americans, the soldiers starved. Some survived growing pumpkins, used human excrement as fertilizer and catching whatever fish they could. After learning that factoid, could never quite look at pumpkins the same.
“We have 2.3 million people employed in a health insurance industry. These people don’t treat a single illness or injury, don’t work in a support function in a hospital or medical office that does treat patients, and provide no value to the health care industry or its clients/customers.”
What a mindless, naïve and ill informed analysis.
I work in the meat business but I am not a slaughter plant worker, rancher, or further processor......I am a broker/trader and therefor in your mind must provide no legitimate function in the industry.
It’s that sort of inane reasoning that one expects from the left to justify their ridiculous “collectivist” proposals.
Elizabeth Warren is a perfect example of a person who, the more you see and hear from them, the less you like them. So that said, keep her nonsense proposals out in the the public domain, they aren’t serious.
You work in an industry where customers and producers almost never interact directly with each other. The broker/trader, therefore, is filling a role that would be no different than a sales function for a producer or a commercial buyer for a customer. In effect, the broker/trader helps your industry operate MORE efficiently. That's a very different function than an insurance carrier in an industry where prices have spiraled out of control largely BECAUSE the third party provides absolutely no value to the transaction and heavily distorts the supply/demand pricing constraints.
I sometimes deal with freight transportation companies in my line of work. You'll never hear me say that the role of the third party logistics provider (3PL) is extraneous and unnecessarily costly. The reason for this is that they've also contributed to a system where -- unlike health care -- costs have generally DECLINED considerably in recent decades.
Agreed. In some ways this article makes the case for Warren. The current regime is WAY too heavy with useless paper pushers.
Full disclosure: I have a family member who works for a BSBS partner. He is the token white guy doing the work of a department of 8. The other 7 being Affirmative Action hires who loaf on the internet and complain all day.
BCBS. Which, in a way, is BSBS if you think about it.
Flailing Arms Fraud’s ATTACK on the citizens of the republic continues...
DISMANTLE CFPB ok squaw?
Those people are already there. And they're not included in the 2.3 million workers in the health insurance industry. They work in administrative support roles in hospitals and medical offices.
Look again at the numbers posted in the article, but in a different context. There are about 1.1 million licensed physicians in this country. Compare that to the 2.3 million employed in the medical insurance industry, or even to the 18 million in the health care sector overall. If my industry operated with that kind of ratio of professionals to support functions, we'd be out of business in 48 hours.
“My grandfather was famous for growing pumpkins” she said. “He grew more pumpkins than anyone else in our village.”
Then she added: “That’s why they killed him.” And then she laughed.”
How terribly sad. A talented farmer murdered and tossed on the altar of an evil political philosophy that’s built entirely on envy and greed.
L
Ann Applebaum wrote in “Red Famine” that the successful farmers were liquidated by the Soviets for being Kulaks, while the poor farmers were punished for not growing enough grain.
Naah.
Overwrought to the point of being nearly meaningless.
BTW, I agree with the author in principle, but this article is kind of a hot mess.
Some people laugh when under stress. She might have been one of them.
When, not if the Communists take over, there will be a lot of killings like the one the woman mentioned. Whether the killings will take place behind prison walls or in the open is the only question.
AS evidenced by the results of the Governor’s Race in Kentucky and the Election in Virginia, the American people no longer want decent, even by today’s standards, governing them. They prefer peverts and degenerates.
Au contraire, I believe the comparison is precisely on point.
The 2.3 million insurance employees are quite arguably far more efficient than a vastly greater number of Federal government bureaucrats could possibly be.
They negotiate better for lower costs precisely because the money is their own not the taxpayer’s. The reason costs continue to increase is what it’s always about supply and demand. Always has been, always will be. If the industry were allowed to function with a minimal amount of “outside” intrusion, legitimate, bonafide competition would be allowed to perform it’s function.
It has absolutely nothing to do with any inefficiency or ineptitude of the 2.3 million insurance employees. They perform as well as one could expect working under existing Fed/state contraints, laws and mandates that perpetually interfere with the ideal function of the industry as a whole.
“...where prices have spiraled out of control largely BECAUSE the third party provides absolutely no value to the transaction and heavily distorts the supply/demand pricing constraints.”
That statement truly is misguided at best. The government is primarily the underlying driver of the hyper inflation of health care costs. And you’re suggesting putting the biggest single market offender in charge of it in toto.
She knows less about economics and business than the kid running the lemonade stand on the corner. What she knows and wants is POWER!!!
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