With the Supreme Court last week wrapping up three days of oral arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, now begins the long wait for the decision. While the justices were to take a first vote on the case last Friday, their decision won’t be released publicly until June—leaving us with three more months of bickering over the legality of the mandate that all Americans carry health insurance or pay a penalty, and agitation over the potential fallout if the law is scrapped in its entirety.
But at least one presidential candidate says we’re arguing over the wrong thing. In a press release last week, Green Party candidate Jill Stein said that whatever the Supreme Court decides, “Americans will still be stuck with an expensive, ineffective health care system that fails to provide quality health care to all Americans.” The real solution? According to Stein, a physician from Lexington, it’s universal, government-provided healthcare, through the “Medicare for All” model touted by the Greens and other progressives.
While the healthcare “debate”—like so many others—often breaks down along partisan lines, Stein contends that there’s enough blame for both the major parties to share. “The mandate that every American buy expensive, inadequate health insurance is a scheme developed by Republicans and foisted on the nation by Democrats. The winners are the health insurance companies,” she noted.
And, Stein added, “Americans spend far more money on health care than other industrial democracies but have a poorly performing health care system, ranked only 37th in the world, due to the cancerous burden of private health insurance. Obama and the Democrats turned their backs on Medicare—a proven solution. Instead they enacted a health insurance mandate whose prime goal will be to increase insurance company profits.”
Stein calls for replacing the Byzantine, costly system now in place with a Medicare-like program that offers full coverage to all, “regardless of employment or medical care status, for all medically necessary services, including: doctor, hospital, preventive, long-term care, mental health, reproductive health care, dental, vision, prescription drug and medical supply costs. … All those complicated forms that have to be filled out for the current multitude of private health insurers would no longer be necessary, and that would save billions in paperwork costs.”
The program, the Green Party says, would be paid for by “recapturing” the administrative waste of the current system and introducing “modest new taxes [that] would replace premiums and out-of-pocket payments currently paid by individuals and business. Costs would be controlled through negotiated fees, global budgeting and bulk purchasing and all necessary care would be provided with no out of pocket costs to patients.” For more information about Stein’s plan, go to www.jillstein.org.
