Mayo Pete And Status Quo Joe Are Fighting For Less Choice In Healthcare

The B-Team-- not as bad as Trump

Everyone should know who Wendell Potter is by now. Aside from being a bestselling author and a advocate for health insurance reform, he's an outspoken former health insurance industry executive (CIGNA), who saw how the health insurance industry could easily game Obamacare and became an early advocate of Bernie's Medicare-for-All proposal. I want to put one of Potter's Twitter storms into narrative form here. Without mentioning them by name, it's an attack on the treacherous betrayals of working families by conservative Democrats Mayo Pete, Bloomberg and Status Quo Joe.

Lately I’ve noticed some Democratic politicians defending the current healthcare system by saying it preserves "choice" for Americans. As a former health insurance exec who helped draft this talking point, I need to come clean on its back story, and why it's wrong and a trap.

When I worked in the insurance industry, we were instructed to talk about “choice,” based on focus groups and people like Frank Luntz (who wrote the book on how the GOP should communicate with Americans). I used it all the time as an industry flack. But there was a problem.

As a health insurance PR guy, we knew one of the huge *vulnerabilities* of the current system was LACK of choice. In the current system, you can’t pick your own doc, specialist, or hospital without huge “out of network” bills. So we set out to muddy the issue of "choice."

As industry insiders, we also knew most Americans have very little choice of their plan. Your company chooses an insurance provider and you get to pick from a few different plans offered by that one insurer, usually either a high deductible plan or a higher deductible plan.

Another problem insurers like mine had on the “choice” issue: people with employer-based plans have very little choice to keep it. You can lose it if your company changes it, or you change jobs, or turn 26 or many other ways. This is a problem for defenders of the status quo.

Knowing we were losing the "choice" argument, my pals in the insurance industry spent millions on lobbying, ads and spin doctors-- all designed to gaslight Americans into thinking that reforming the status quo would somehow give them "less choice."

This isn't the only time the industry made "choice" a big talking point in its scheme to fight health reform. Soon after Obamacare was passed, it created a front group called the Choice and Competition Coalition, to scare states away from creating exchanges with better plans.

The difference is, this time Democrats are the ones parroting the misleading "choice" talking point. And they're even using it as a weapon against each other. Back in my insurance PR days, this would have stunned me. I bet my old colleagues are thrilled, and celebrating.

The truth, of course, is you have little "choice" in healthcare now. Most can’t keep their plan as long as they want, or visit any doctor or hospital. Some reforms, like Medicare For All, would let you. In other words, Medicare-for-All actually offers more choice than the status quo.

So if a politician tells you they oppose reforming the current healthcare system because they want to preserve "choice," either they don't know what they're talking about-- or they're willfully ignoring the truth. I assure you, the insurance industry is delighted either way.

Have you actually read Bernie's Medicare for All proposal, the real one, not the version being twisted out of shape by Mayo Pete, Status Quo Joe, the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and their lobbyists, the corrupted Democratic establishment and the Republican Party? These are the key points:

• Create a Medicare for All, single-payer, national health insurance program to provide everyone in America with comprehensive health care coverage, free at the point of service.
• No networks, no premiums, no deductibles, no copays, no surprise bills.
• Medicare coverage will be expanded and improved to include: include dental, hearing, vision, and home- and community-based long-term care, in-patient and out-patient services, mental health and substance abuse treatment, reproductive and maternity care, prescription drugs, and more.
• Stop the pharmaceutical industry from ripping off the American people by making sure that no one in America pays over $200 a year for the medicine they need by capping what Americans pay for prescription drugs under Medicare for All.

"Today," wrote Bernie, "more than 30 million Americans still don’t have health insurance and even more are underinsured. Even for those with insurance, costs are so high that medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Incredibly, we spend significantly more of our national GDP on this inadequate health care system-- far more per person than any other major country. And despite doing so, Americans have worse health outcomes and a higher infant mortality rate than countries that spend much less on health care. Our people deserve better. We should be spending money on doctors, nurses, mental health specialists, dentists, and other professionals who provide services to people and improve their lives. We must invest in the development of new drugs and technologies that cure disease and alleviate pain-- not wasting hundreds of billions of dollars a year on profiteering, huge executive compensation packages, and outrageous administrative costs. The giant pharmaceutical and health insurance lobbies have spent billions of dollars over the past decades to ensure that their profits come before the health of the American people. We must defeat them, together. That means joining every other major country on Earth and guaranteeing health care to all people as a right, not a privilege, through a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program."

And we'll end with a look at some new polling (just above) that measured support for Medicare-for-All among registered voters and also just among registered Catholic voters, using two different ways of framing the question. Looks like despite all the millions of dollars that Big PhRMA and the insurance company crooks-- plus the Status Quo Joe and Mayo Pete campaigns-- have spent denigrating it, voters still understand that Medicare-for-All is good for them and for their families.