Nearly a year ago
last September, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy unburdened himself to Vox reporter
Jeff Stein. Vox Media is a reliably progressive site launched in 2014 by
founders Ezra Klein, Melissa Bell, and Matthew Yglesias.
Stein titled his 2017
piece “Sen. Murphy thinks he can build an on-ramp to single payer health care’
and provided a helpful single line summary:
“The Connecticut Democrat will advance a plan he argues ‘may be the
fastest way to a single-payer system.’”
Socialist Bernie
Sanders had just extruded a bill that would “create a single government insurer
to give Medicare free of charge to everyone in the country with virtually no
copayments and no-deductibles.” Quarrelsome free-marketers argued that there is
no such thing as a free lunch; a federal insurance program – which would
necessarily displace insurance companies – would not be free. Both the Sanders
and Murphy plans are tax supported universal health care systems that would
cost, some attentive healthcare analysts think, upwards of $30 trillion over a ten
year period and a likely annual tax increase of $26,000 per American household
– not exactly pocket change.
The elimination of
insurance companies which, under a Sanders universal health care system, would
simply disappear – and good riddance to them – did not seem to disturb Murphy,
who hails from a state that used to be called the insurance capital of the
world and which still employs a goodly number of insurance workers. Connecticut still ranks first nationally in insurance carrier employment as a percentage of the state’s total employment, 3 percent.
Murphy told Stein, “…
he may wind up co-sponsoring Sanders’s bill…
‘If I were building a health care system, from scratch, I’d start with a
single-payer system.’”
Murphy noticed a fly
in the Sanders socialist ointment however. Connecticut’s Junior Senator was
concerned that a rapid and irrecoverable destruction of insurance companies
might be too shocking for people less progressive than he. And so he proposed
what Vox called “a third way” in which the insurance companies, like lobsters,
are mercifully dispatched in pots of water, the temperature of which is
gradually raised to boiling so that the lobsters are spared a quick and painful
death.
Here is Murphy’s
idea, according to Vox: “Allow every American, both individuals and companies,
to purchase Medicare. Murphy’s hope is that if enough people purchase Medicare
— and Murphy is confident they will en
masse if they can — then the private health insurance would begin to shrink
gradually. As a result, the government will swallow more and more of the
private health insurance markets, setting up the trajectory for achieving a
single-payer system.”
The problem is not
that a single payer system will provide fewer and more inferior services, or
that it will over a period of time become nearly as expensive and much more
poorly run than the current free market system, or that a single payer system
effectively eliminates the kind of competition among healthcare providers that
serves to restrain autocratic price and tax increases, or that, once destroyed,
the private market in insurance cannot be re-installed; once lost, the private
insurance market will be permanently lost.
No, the problem with
Sanders’ health care reform is that it is politically awkward. “I have a
feeling,” Murphy told Stein, that “if everybody could buy into Medicare, people
would choose to do so — and then you’d naturally transition to a single-payer
system without a massive political fight.” Murphy’s third way envisions a very
gradual destruction of the nation’s largest private sector industry employer.
Health care accounts for 13 percent of the total U.S. workforce, having surpassed
manufacturing in 2003 and retail trade in 2007.
It’s perfectly obvious
that just as Obamacare was a baby step in the direction of universal
healthcare, so is Murphy’s "third way" a progressive vehicle that leads in the
same direction. Indeed. Murphy’s preference for universal healthcare is
unambiguously indicated in his Vox Media interview. The progressive march
towards universal healthcare cannot advance without the slow evisceration of
the insurance business. Drawing on tax resources, the federal government will
simply underprice the cost of insurance until private providers are driven from
the field.
It is not obvious
from the contributions to Murphy’s reelection campaign that contributors know
the Senator is braiding a rope with which he and Sanders will string up financial
executives, for the transformation of such a large portion of the private
economy will affect every business sector, including the finance wizards
contributing mindlessly to Murphy’s campaign which, even now, is bursting at
the seams. According to Open Secrets, Murphy has raised $13,341,538 from 2013 – 2018 and has $8,471,202 cash in
hand for his reelection, after which he will begin in earnest to transform the
national economy. And anyone who believes that his campaign coffers are swelling
from contributions made by the proletariat without the assistance of high priced lawyers, financial gurus and even doctors, is a sucker born yesterday.
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