Alex Lawson talks about the U.S. healthcare crisis, where Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have refused to restore Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies and if not approved, will cause many of the 24 million ACA recipients to see their monthly insurance premiums double or triple, resulting in millions losing their coverage. He also discusses long term solutions to America’s broken health care system.
That’s not in the future, that has happened. And so we’re already seeing hospitals closing or cutting back services. Usually emergency rooms and maternity wards are the first on the chopping block. And this destruction is just rolling across the country right now. Everyone will get hurt, but it will especially impact people in rural areas. It’ll impact older folks. It’ll kill and harm disproportionately the most vulnerable in our society. So the oldest of the old, seniors with disabilities, poorer seniors. And what we’re talking about, the models for just the Medicaid side is around 51,000 preventable deaths a year from this trillion dollar cut. And that number is going to increase when you add in the five million who lose their coverage because they can no longer afford it, because the Republicans refuse to prevent the premium spikes.
And importantly, it’s really important for people to remember why did they do this? Why are people going to die? Why are we seeing the largest transformation of our healthcare system since Medicare? Except this time, it’s taking healthcare away from people, all so that the Republicans could give trillions of dollars in tax handouts to billionaires. Literally, the richest people in the history of the world, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, those billionaires who sat behind President Trump when he was sworn in. You know, he was showing who he’s working for. And you know what? He’s working for them extremely hard. The billionaires are making out and the working people in this country are going to pay the price for their billionaire’s new golden yacht or whatever they spend their money on with our health, our well-being and in too many cases, our lives.
SCOTT HARRIS: Alex, as I’m sure many of our listeners are aware, there was a vote last week in the Senate where they voted down both a Democratic plan that would extend …
ALEX LAWSON: the subsidies for ACA …
SCOTT HARRIS: as well as a Republican plan put forward where I think people would get $1,000 or $1,500 to put into a health savings account, which would in no way be able to pay for the additional costs of people’s insurance, which could go up tens of thousands of dollars.
But at any rate, now the House is set to consider a Republican bill to enhance access to employer-sponsored health insurance plans and clamp down on pharmacy benefit managers. Again, nothing to do with restoring the subsidies to ACA and nothing really to help out people who are going to face these enormous increases in monthly insurance premium costs. Tell us a little bit about what’s happening in the House likely this week.
ALEX LAWSON: Yeah. And I think it’s really important to be super honest with your listeners about what’s going on. The Republicans, both in the Senate and the House are offering the American people basically the policy equivalent of a bag of broken glass with rusty nails in it. And they’re like, “This is healthcare,” while the Democrats’ plan far from dealing with the healthcare crisis that we’re already in, all it does is extends subsidies to keep things where they are for three years as we figure out how to deal with the fact that we have the worst healthcare in the developed world.
Among our peer nations, we are the only country that does not guarantee healthcare for everyone. We pay the most for our healthcare and the outcomes are the worst for the majority of people. It is an absolute upside-down world where the Republican proposals, their quote “solutions” unquote just make the system worse than it already is because they’re not actually interested in solving anything.
Neither do any of these supposed Republican plans have a path to passing. They’re not passing, they’re not talking about the same thing in the Senate and the House. And the president has signaled that he’s not interested in signing something. So all the Republicans are doing is trying to confuse people to make it seem like they have a plan. They don’t have a plan. Their entire plan is to take healthcare away from the American people and leave the most vulnerable in our society out there to be harmed and in many cases to die due to lack of access to healthcare.
So the Republicans don’t have a plan. The Democrats have consistently put forward this stop-gap measure. Three years, let’s just do three years, keep it at status quo. Most of these subsidies are going into MAGA country. Most of the subsidies that the Republicans are refusing to continue actually help their own constituents the most.
Democrats are saying, “Hey, we’ll do you a solid and let you vote for this, which helps your constituents.” And the Republicans are saying “no.” So I think the most important thing for people to really understand is that the Republicans do not have a plan. Their whole thing is to pretend that they have a plan so that they can say, “Oh, well, we put forward a plan.” And then it was defeated by the Democrats. And then they’ll go home and they’ll say, “The Democrats are the reason that your healthcare prices are going up.” But as a great philosopher once said, “You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” And the American people are getting these bills right now and they understand that the Republicans control the White House, the Senate and the House, and that the Republicans are the reason that the American people’s healthcare costs are skyrocketing and that it’ll just get worse.
SCOTT HARRIS: We’re speaking with Alex Lawson this evening on Counterpoint. Alex is executive director of Social Security Works. And Alex, in terms of the bigger picture, an increasing number of Americans are dissatisfied or horrified with the U.S. healthcare system. Many think it’s completely broken. Is this a moment, in your view, in U.S. politics, where proposals for universal healthcare could gain traction such as the long-running proposal to institute a Medicare for all program, a single-payer program like much of the rest of the developing world has had for decades?
ALEX LAWSON: I think we are approaching a unique spot where it will be possible, but unfortunately we have to deal with the reality of our system. President Trump is going to be president for his entire term, and this is not a guy who’s going to extend healthcare to anybody. What he is going to do though is make things so bad that coming out the other side of the Trump era, amongst all the other things that we will have to fix, we all have to remember that we can’t just go back to the way things were, the way things were before Trump 2.0, they weren’t working then. So we do need to be preparing and working every day to transition to guaranteed healthcare for every person in this country. You get sick, you get the care that you need, no premium, no deductible, no prior authorizations, no AI robot denials.
None of this happens in any other country other than ours. We allow ourselves to be exploited by a system that is not broken. It is working exactly as designed. It is just predatory and a wealth extraction system, not a healthcare system. So I think that some of the stuff that really needs to be happening right now is that states are going to be on the hook for enormous health insurance losses. You take California and Washington and Oregon and they’re looking at the federal government pulling back and some of these states are going to step up and they’re just going to look at the arithmetic and say, “It actually makes more financial sense for our states to offer a single-payer, state-based system, then they can do multiple states and then maybe we can bring that out to the entire country.” That’s how single-payer was achieved in Canada.
And I think that that is a good model for us to follow right now. We’re never going to stop fighting for Medicare for all at the federal level and we have to continue to prepare the groundwork for when Trump 2.0 is over and we have this ability to build a society and a better future for everyone by defeating the billionaires and saying, “No, we’re not going to give you tax cuts paid for by the lives of the most vulnerable in our society. We’re going to reconfigure our society to value people over billionaires.” But I do think that there is a lot of interesting and really important work happening at the state level as well. And you talked about it, but really people still do not understand what the trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid is going to mean in their lives—hospitals closing, nursing homes closing.
It will be apocalypse across the country. And so I do think that in the next three years, there is a really large role for states to play in reorganizing and reorienting the American system to provide healthcare and not profits for Wall Street.
SCOTT HARRIS: I hear what you’re saying is very hopeful in terms of groups of states getting together and then having the kind of population and the base of financing that’s necessary for a single-payer system. Vermont tried it and it didn’t work out probably for a lot of different reasons, but when states get together and see the alternative, the dramatic cuts in federal help for individual insurance holders, it seems like the only choice. And I’m glad to hear things are moving along on that scale. And I think voters are going to reject any Democratic candidates who run around campaigning in the midterm elections and just propose bandaids to the current system. As you said, it wasn’t good before Trump came in. It’s been dysfunctional for decades upon decades. But yeah, I’m glad to hear about this state, a group of states that we will hopefully provide some alternatives, some real alternatives, viable alternatives.
Thank you, Alex. Appreciate all you do for calling this catastrophe of our healthcare system out and some of the solutions. And please leave our listeners with the web address for your group or any other resources that will help people get some more information about this topic.
ALEX LAWSON: And we’re at socialsecurityworks.org, and we will have large campaigns running all throughout next year, fighting against the Republican healthcare apocalypse. We’re going to really focus on rural hospital closures and we’ve had protests across this country in targeted districts. There’s Republicans who won by fewer votes. Miller Meeks in Iowa, she won by 800 votes. She’s stealing 60,000 people’s healthcare. So working together, we can fight back and we will win. So you can come and get organized with us at socialsecurityworks.org.
