An editorial published on Christmas by the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post inveighed against supporters of Medicare for All in the United States, pointing to the struggles of Britain’s chronically underfunded National Health Service as a “cautionary tale” while ignoring research showing that a single-payer system would save the US hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives each year.
The editorial, headlined “Socialized medicine can’t survive the winter,” laments the “religious-like devotion to the NHS” in the United Kingdom even as “hospital corridors overflow and routine procedures get canceled due to a catastrophic event commonly known as ‘winter.'”
The Post editorial board, led by opinion editor Adam O’Neal, waves away expert analyses showing that the UK government is underinvesting in its healthcare system relative to other countries in Europe, resulting in the kinds of problems the Thursday editorial attributed to the supposedly inherent flaws of single-payer systems.
“This is the dark reality of single-payer and a cautionary tale for the third of Americans who mistakenly believe Medicare for All is a good idea,” the editorial declared ominously.
The editorial understates Medicare for All’s popularity among US voters. A recent Data for Progress survey found that even after hearing common opposing arguments, 58% of voters strongly or somewhat support improving Medicare and expanding it to cover everyone in the US.
A separate poll conducted by GQR Research found that 54% of voters nationally, and 56% in battleground districts, support Medicare for All. US Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the co-leader of the Medicare for All Act in the House, is reportedly planning to present those findings to colleagues next month as she pushes Democrats to rally behind her legislation ahead of the critical midterm elections.
The renewed push for Medicare for All comes as the corporate-dominated healthcare status quo hits Americans with massive premium hikes stemming from congressional Republicans’ refusal to extend Affordable Care Act tax credits.
Predictably, the Post’s editorial board—which Bezos has instructed to write “every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets”—neglected to mention the myriad horrors of the United States’ for-profit system in its diatribe against Medicare for All.
The editorial also ignores research showing potentially massive benefits from a transition to Medicare for All, which would virtually eliminate private insurance while providing comprehensive coverage to everyone in the US for free at the point of service.
One study published in The Lancet estimated that a Medicare for All system would save more than 68,000 lives and over $450 billion in healthcare expenditures annually.
An analysis by Yale researchers calculated that “if the US had had a single-payer universal healthcare system in 2020″—which marked the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic—”nearly 212,000 American lives would have been saved that year” and “the country would have saved $105 billion in Covid-19 hospitalization expenses alone.”
Republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
