“UPDATE”. According to this article on CounterPunch on 11/10/25 I got one thing completely wrong in my Friday Nite Check In story on 11/7/25…, I thought the insurance mandate and penalty for not having insurance was still in force…, I guess that is not the case.
But pretty much everything else is pretty much as I described.
“When President Trump came into office the first time, he and Congress eliminated the individual mandate, but did nothing to make health care more affordable. Now it was legal to be uninsured again.
While people struggled to pay their medical bills, one sector of the economy that was not struggling was the insurance industry, which was collecting the subsidies every year from Uncle Sam, plus the premiums that individuals and their families paid every month, plus the yearly deductibles. Health insurance companies collected billions before they ever had to pay out one penny for medical claims.
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Instead of shutting down the government and demanding real health reform, Democrats are quibbling over subsidies that keep Americans underinsured and in medical debt and importantly, continue pouring billions into the till of the health insurance industry.
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If every crisis presents an opportunity, let’s use this one to pass a national, single payer health care system that guarantees health care to everyone and removes all profit from health care. Nothing short of this can heal this nation.”
It's definitely a shit show
ReplyDeleteYeah..., here is another quote from Dean Baker on the CounterPunch site the other day...,
Delete"If we’re really serious about cracking down on the money sucking insurance companies, why not go all the way and just provide universal Medicare. This would not only save the money directly paid to insurers, it would also eliminate much of the cost that hospitals, doctors’ offices and other providers have to incur dealing with complex forms from multiple insurers. This could save as much as $1 trillion($8,000 per household) a year compared to what we pay now for administrative costs and insurance industry profits.
A universal Medicare system would also mean that everyone has access to healthcare regardless of where they work, what government program they qualify for, or if they remembered to pay their insurance premium last month."