Medicare and the Mythical "Government Takeover"

The right wing is claiming that Obama wants to take over the healthcare behemoth. But the left says that there's already a single-payer, low overhead system that works fine in Medicare. What's up? Here's my take.

For the sake of argument, let's go way out on a limb and say that the right wing is in bed with the insurance industry and big pharma. Now let's look at Medicare. Doctors don't like it because it doesn't pay enough. But health insurance and big pharma like it. If you don't believe me, look at the GOP Medicare bill that used Medicare to hand $700 billion taxpayer dollars to pharma.

Health insurance CEOs love Medicare, because the government is taking the highest risk, lowest profit customers off their hands, and they can fleece the rest of us for more money (insurance companies want to insure people who don't get sick). It's the right wing's view of "free market economy": the rich get to benefit and everyone else assumes the risk (see the mortgage fiasco).

Big pharma loves Medicare because it covers the demographic that consumes large quantities of medicine, and billing for pills is much easier than procedures and office visits as doctors must do. Doctors and clinics hate Medicare, but they don't have the lobby that huge insurance and pharma corporations do.

But if they love Medicare, why are they sh@#ting chickens right now and screaming bloody murder? Because they see a system like Medicare for the rest of us taking market share, pure and simple. Forget the fact that this "government takeover" would cover those without health insurance, who are never, ever, going to buy it from and insurance corporation. But they see a day when a public plan is available, with 4% overhead, and they are chugging along, raking in 30% profits, and someone notices that they offer nothing but a place to dump huge sums of money and get little coverage.

They fear an exodus.

That is why the U.S. still has Medicare through 8 years of complete GOP dominance. If they were really against socialized healthcare they would have killed it instead of dumping nearly a trillion dollars into it. But we all know that the GOP will sell out any ideology for power, and killing Medicare would turn off the entire AARP. And we know that there is no way they are going to kill Medicare because it increases profits for the healthcare industry. And this is why the healthcare industry hates the thought of a public option: it would take money out of CEOs' pockets by taking some of the milk from the cash cow that is the American Middle Class.