Health Care: A Casualty of Class Warfare

As the Great Recession rolls on after three years, without signs of relief on the horizon, a growing army of many millions of Americans is finding it impossible to gain access to necessary health care that is affordable. Meanwhile, class warfare is gaining intensity with a widening gulf between the left and right over the major issues of the day, including the future of U.S. health care. As political gridlock continues, the battlefield is littered with many preventable deaths, many lives wounded by the ravages of untreated or under-treated disease, and growing stress in affected families.

The public discourse is reaching new levels of ugliness, as illustrated by an audience at a GOP campaign event cheering the idea that that those without health insurance should just be left to die. (Krugman, P. Free to die. Op-Ed. New York Times, September 16, 2011: A23). GOP presidential hopefuls have no solutions to offer except the “freedom to choose” (your own fate!) and the private marketplace (which increasingly excludes those who cannot pay its rapidly increasing costs). In fact, they exacerbate the problem, under the guise of fiscal responsibility and austerity, by cutting government safety net programs while at the same time trying to exploit Medicare and Medicaid by further privatization.

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These are some markers that show some of the impacts of this war:

• According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2010 49.9 million Americans were uninsured (which understates the problem since anyone with insurance for even a small part of the year was considered insured), the median household income was $49,445 (a drop of 2.3 percent from 2009), and 46.2 million people (including 22 percent of the nation’s children) were in poverty (the highest number in the 52 years for which estimates have been tracked). (U.S. Census Bureau. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States, 2010)
• In his recent editorial in The Progressive, Matthew Rothschild notes that, over the last 40 years, the top 0.1 percent of the population (152,000 people making more than $5.6 million a year) skyrocketed by 385 percent while the income of the bottom 90 percent (about 137 million people) dropped by 1 percent.(Washington Post) In the last ten years, the median income of working-age households has dropped by more than 10 percent (Economic Policy Institute). (Rothschild, M. Enlist for class warfare. The Progressive, September 20, 2011)
• According to a Gallup poll, 18.2 percent of Americans state they did not have money to buy food at all times in 2010. (Gallup, Washington, D.C.)
• The median household wealth of white families has fallen by 16 percent since 2005; Hispanic families dropped by 66 percent. (Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends project. Washington, D.C.)
• Three-quarters of the increase in U.S. corporate profit margins over the last ten years have come from depressed wages. (J. P. Morgan, New York City) (Harper’s Index 323 (1937): 15, 68, October, 20ll).
• U.S. corporations pay only 10.5 percent of their profits in taxes today (vs. 40 percent in 1961, with some paying no taxes. (Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, D.C.)
• Based on a definition of the middle class of those between the 30th and 70th percentiles of the income distribution, one-third of Americans dropped out of the middle class over the last 30 years. (Acs, G. Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking Up from the American Dream. Economic Mobility Project. Pew Charitable Trusts, September, 2011).
• The average annual premium for health insurance for a family of four reached $15,073 in 2011, 9 percent higher than 2010 (Abelson, R, Bernstein, N. Health insurers push premiums sharply higher. New York Times, September 28, 2011: A1) (an unaffordable level about 30 percent of the median family income, or twice the proportion of income that seniors paid for health care when Medicare was enacted in 1965!).
• In the most recent study of mortality amenable to health care in 16 high-income nations, the U.S. ‘led’ the field with the most preventable deaths, and with the least improvement over a ten-year period; the authors concluded this poor showing is likely due to “the lack of universal coverage and the high costs of care.” (Nolte, E, McKee, M. Variations in amenable mortality—Trends in 16 high-income nations. The Commonwealth Fund, September 23, 2011)
• The consumer confidence level is now only 45 percent. (Vital signs. Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2011: A1) Despite all this pain and suffering, the political process continues to ignore this national catastrophe in the name of austerity as the debate continues over the budget deficit, targeting federal spending for education, health care and other important public programs (but avoiding bigger issues, such as major defense cutbacks, real financial reform, campaign finance reform, and tax increases for the wealthy). The extreme right-wing of the Republican Party, activated and hobbled by the Tea Party, continues to hold Congress and the Obama Administration hostage as it pursues its nihilistic agenda, focused on winning further power in 2012 despite its lack of a plan to address these kinds of problems.

The present situation in health care boils down to a human and moral crisis that seems beyond the reach or concern of our current political leaders, conflicted as they are by enormous amounts of corporate cash that perpetuates our present, increasingly cruel market-based system. In our next post, we will explore whether we still can draw on a long-standing self-image that we as Americans care about each other.