Countries with nationalized healthcare programs have healthier populations than the US as measured by numerous metrics (life expectancy, infant mortality). Healthcare costs are the leading cause of individual bankruptcy in the United States; such bankruptcies are rare in countries with nationalized systems.
Despite these advantages, the Right is steadfastly against the implementation of nationalized healthcare in the USA. The reason is simple; privatized healthcare is enormously profitable. Pharmaceutical companies don’t care whether patients have to make a choice between paying the heating bill and taking their medicine. They want their money. Insurance companies don’t care whether cancer patients lose their homes; they want their money.
And thus, a heavily financed campaign to demonize nationalized healthcare has been raging nonstop for years in this country. Right-wing voters who would actually benefit from the a nationalized program, have been tricked into spreading propaganda that only benefits healthcare corporations and their investors.
I saw an example of this last week after election officials had difficulty tabulating the results of the Iowa caucuses. “These are the people you want running your healthcare system?” the Right taunted, insinuating that a government that could not count votes was inherently incompetent. It seems like a reasonable argument on the surface, but let’s look at the details.
The difficulties faced by the Iowa Democratic Party last week were caused initially by an app that malfunctioned. The Democratic Party did not create the app; a private, for-profit company did. The Iowa debacle was not caused by a failure of government but by a failure of the private sector. Perhaps a better question would be, “Do you want the private sector administering your healthcare coverage when they can’t code an app to count a few numbers?”
When that expensive, private sector, for profit app didn’t work, the Iowa Democratic party resorted to their backup plan. They encouraged officials from around the state to report results by telephone.
The Iowa Democratic Party’s one mistake in all of this was to overestimate the goodness of mankind. When they posted the voting hotline number online, Trump supporters immediately began calling it in an attempt to tie up the phone line. They succeeded.
If you’re keeping track, we have listed two failures so far. Some faulty software developed by a corporation in the private sector failed to work as expected, and then the phone system was clogged by bad actors from the opposition party.
But there was really a third critical failure in this scenario, and this one wasn’t caused by government either.
The telephone lines are managed not by government, but by private sector corporations. Why were those phone lines so easily incapacitated by what amounts to be a crude Denial of Service attach (DoS)? Why wasn’t the threat repelled? Why wasn’t extra bandwidth provisioned dynamically?
The Iowa causes disaster was not caused by government inefficiency, as some on the Right would have you believe. The blame for the failures lies with for-profit private sector companies and with bad actors who were intent on disrupting the process. Do you still want corporations to administer your healthcare coverage, even if it means that they will take your last penny should you become gravely ill?
