In Defense Of A Nation’s Health
First published in the print column, Strictly Haresay
There’s a young Indian man on Youtube by the name of Ramit Sethi who posts videos doling out financial and investment advice. Often times, his strategies for increasing wealth and quality of life are much different than what we’re used to hearing, such as, “renting instead of buying can be the smarter move,” and he goes on to explain when and why that might be true. The fact that he himself is already financially independent at such a young age makes a person think he just might know what he’s talking about.
Something he’s said more than once is, “Show me a list of someone’s spending habits, and I’ll show you their priorities.”
It’s not hard to recognize the truth in that statement; most of us know where we tend to waste money, where we could stand to tighten up the belt a notch or two, and the areas we should be trying to grow. We truly do put our money where are priorities are, even if we don’t like to admit where they lie.
Turns out we are not alone, as individuals, in this regard.
If our federal budget is a reflection of our national priorities—as it must be—I would ask, Whose priorities?
Last week the Senate voted in favor of an unprecedented $886 billion dollar budget for the Pentagon in 2024, which is nearly double the total U.S. military spending at the height of the Iraq war. In fact, the Pentagon is on track to increase spending by 20 percent in Biden’s first three years in office. (Trump did it in four.)
Reports of the Defense Department’s spending in 2023 revealed $398.7 billion (71 percent of the overall budget) went to private contractors, with the remaining 29 percent paying DOD personnel salaries. Those are some sobering priorities to think about.
So when people argue against universal health care—like every other advanced nation on the planet provides its citizens—on the basis of ‘we can’t afford to pay for that,’ I have to think that it is largely because they don’t realize just how much money runs through the hands of our government, and how possible it really is to allocate it differently if priorities were adjusted.
Then there are those that like to throw the word “socialism” at the idea of universal healthcare, not realizing the system we have now is already a sort of weird hodgepodge of free market health care and socialized healthcare—espousing all the downfalls of both and the benefits of neither, resulting in a system that is costing us even more than just straight up paying for everyones healthcare. (Thank you health industry lobbyists.)
For further pondering, one could chew on these figures: Gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2023 for UnitedHealth was $156.4 billion; that’s a 112.53 percent increase over the prior fiscal year. The company’s annual gross profit for 2022 was $79.6 billion, which was a 14.31 percent increase from 2021, which saw an increase of $69.652 billion over 2020. And this, at a time when one in four Americans lives with medical debt, 85 million Americans are uninsured and 18 million Americans every year can’t afford to fulfill their medical prescriptions, while the top five pharmaceutical companies in the country made over $80 billion in profit last year alone.
This isn’t just a broken system. It’s criminally skewed prioritizing dictated by corporations that are proctoring our policy-making for the sake of their own profits.
And no matter what side of the political aisle you’re on, or what label you want to slap over single-pay universal healthcare—like we already have with Medicare, Medicaid, VA and government employee benefits—the bleeding of the American people over insurance and healthcare costs needs to stop. And that should be a priority for everyone.
