In terms of healthcare, we’re bombarded with misinformation and gaslighting. In 2019, the editors of greater than two dozen scientific journals across the planet revealed an editorial to “sound the alarm that human lives are at stake” due to medical misinformation.
These physicians commonly encountered sufferers hesitant to take doubtlessly life saving drugs primarily based on one thing they learn on-line or noticed on TV or heard from pals.
Then the COVID pandemic occurred and a tsunami of BS adopted. The anti-vaccination motion (inspired by the far proper) and an idiotically irresponsible Trump administration gave us a lot unnecessary illness and dying.
There’s additionally the profit-driven, bad-faith misinformation of the medical-industrial complicated (which incorporates insurance coverage corporations, Huge Pharma, hospitals and medical gadget corporations). A few years in the past, former Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) stated it was “greater than the military-industrial complicated.” It’s the most important impediment to the U.S. instituting a nationwide well being care system like all the opposite developed nations.
Paula Noonan tracks all of the payments popping out of our state legislature on her web site Colorado Capitol Watch. She informed me she seen legislators find yourself proposing good well being care reforms that take care of plenty of bits and items. In her column in Colorado Politics, she notes:
“Some points by no means go away. We lack the need to repair them, the problems are too huge and sophisticated, and/or legislators and the Governor will solely nibble on the edges reasonably than take the large chunk. Well being care in its numerous varieties and impacts falls into every no-fix class.”
She surveys a number of worthy healthcare payments of this type after which notes the exception that “could present some readability on resolving most well being care protection issues.” That will be HB 1209, Analyze Statewide Publicly Financed Well being Care. She concludes:
“Nibbles at well being care have produced a chaotic, indescribably difficult system that’s left 300,000 Coloradans with out medical insurance. Undoubtedly well being care will at all times be on the state’s legislative agenda. However so many payments to ‘repair’ a system that everybody will use in some unspecified time in the future most likely means the system, as is, is past restore.”
Noonan additionally lists the lobbyists eager about payments. Many lobbyists from the medical-industrial complicated (and different enterprise pursuits) are opposing HB 1209. Psychological Well being Colorado and the Cross-Incapacity Coalition are among the many supporters.
Younger Invincibles (YI) is one other group supporting the invoice. They’re a nationwide nonpartisan nonprofit that works to uplift the voices of younger adults 18-34 within the political course of.
Their identify is an ironic touch upon an insurance coverage trade time period for younger individuals who really feel they’re proof against illness and harm. They know they aren’t invincible. YI can be involved with increased schooling, financial safety, psychological well being and civic engagement points.
HB 1209 asks the Colorado Faculty of Public Well being to review the impacts of a common well being care system in Colorado to particular person and neighborhood well being and to the well being care workforce.
The invoice was launched by Reps. Andrew Boesenecker (Fort Collins) and Karen McCormick (Longmont) within the Home and Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis (Longmont) within the Senate. All are Democrats.
I talked with Boesenecker over the cellphone as he drove house after prolonged Republican filibustering of payments over an exhausting couple of days. The Democrats have a stable majority within the legislature however the Republicans are hoping to gradual issues down. Boesenecker is majority co-whip.
Boesenecker is a musician and former public college music instructor. He’s additionally a former Lutheran pastor. He was a chaplain on the Northern Colorado Medical Middle in Greeley and noticed individuals within the burn unit, intensive care and pediatrics. He had “numerous conversations” with sufferers who have been anxious about the price of their well being care and their capability to pay for important procedures.
Boesenecker stated HB 1209 is an outgrowth of a 91-page examine in 2021 by the Colorado Faculty of Public Well being which concluded {that a} publicly financed and privately delivered system may present well being protection to each resident, improve employment and enhance total inhabitants well being. On the identical time, we’d spend billions lower than we’re spending now on well being care. Such a system is known as single payer.
The state legislature commissioned the examine in 2019 which had a activity pressure with bipartisan membership appointed by the governor and each events’ management.
Well being care needs to be a human proper and a public good reasonably than as a commodity. Many thousands and thousands of individuals are pushed into poverty every year due to well being care prices. Time for Huge Change.
