AB2200 - Single Payer Healthcare Committee Comments close 4/16/24

Here's my letter to the legislature about AB2200 (the California Guaranteed Health Care for All Act (also known as CalCare) single-payer healthcare for California.

You can still write them (or just copy/paste what's below) by Tuesday, April 16, at this link. Just select AB2200 as the bill on which you'll comment. 

My note:

The US currently pays roughly double the cost of healthcare in single-payer Medicare-for-all nations with worse healthcare outcomes. A World Health Organization study in 2000 ranks US health outcomes (life expectancy, vaccination rates, patient satisfaction, infant mortality, etc.) 37th in the world, between Costa Rica and Slovenia. The Sacramento Bee said, "It's as though we have the health care of Costa Rica and pay six times more for it."

Our current health care also means the US experiences more than a half million medical bankruptcies annually. Canada and France--single-payer countries with similar demographics to the US--have none. Perhaps related: The US incarcerates at five times the world average, seven times more, per capita, than Canada and France. So are French or Canadian crime rates worse than the US? Nope. About the same or less.

Could making more than a half million people desperate every year generate more crime? There's even a Netflix series ("Breaking Bad") that describes how a chemistry teacher starts cooking meth to pay hospital bills. Sure, that's fiction, but it's not too much of a stretch to believe desperation drives people to crime.

We could continue the beatings until morale improves, but we've already tried more policing and incarceration. Between 1982 and 2017 US population increased 42%, but spending on policing increased 187%. 

How about we try treating people well? The all-sticks-no-carrots approach works so poorly. Cops only solve an estimated 15% of crimes, and less than half (40%) of the murders in California. The "copaganda" so ubiquitous on TV says Perry Mason always gets the bad guy, but that's a Hollywood illusion. Let's try something that really works: taking care of people.

Why don't we have single-payer healthcare now? When Harry Truman proposed it in 1948, the southern senators ("Dixiecrats" - now switched to Republicans by Richard Nixon) opposed the bill. They were concerned they might have to share their hospitals with people of color. 

Racism! The gift that keeps on giving!