Publicly Funded Health Care Not A For-Profit Investment

SAN FRANCISCO (05-31) – A consortium of activists and physicians representing numerous groups along with others held a rally on May 31 at the Embarcadero calling for the establishment of a publicly funded national single-payer medical program on the Single-Payer National Day of Action. After an informative rally the group marched to the offices of BlackRock the largest asset manager in the US that owns a 10 percent interest in United Health Care (UHC) making it the company’s second largest shareholder.

UHC in turn is the largest for-profit health insurer and “largest denier of health claims” in the US and stands accused by activists of “stealing $3.7 billion from Medicare in one year” through its corporate private health care insurance business.

Protesters are calling for the elimination of all private for-profit health insurance companies in the US by establishing a federal single payer medical program that covers all Americans “from cradle to grave” to end the corporate takeover and greed for this vital human right as recognized by the Constitution of the World Health Organization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that states “governments have a responsibility to ensure access to health services for all people.”

Anna Manilow, MD, from the National Single Payer, Movement to End Privatization of Medicare, addressed the urgent need for health care reform in the US by noting that they are “going on the offensive to put single-payer on the nation’s agenda” as the best way to eliminate the pending DOGE Medicaid cuts. The plan would eliminate the fraud and abuse the present system engenders and stop the obscene profits of corporate health insurance along with medical debt and bankruptcies for those who become seriously ill and in “freeing all caregivers from corporate control.”

On December 4 of last year, UHC CEO Brian Thompson was shot from behind and killed in New York city allegedly by Luigi Mangione who was later arrested as a suspect and charged with murder and terrorism in the killing. At the time it was speculated Mangioni’s motive was to kill a high-profile health care executive to bring attention to his personal medical grievances with the private health care system and in his hatred for corporate greed.

MC Steve Zeltzer, Director of Labortech, debunked the oft-used rebuke of why a health care system for all is not possible by reminding everyone that there already is a fine example of such a system, namely for veterans that is also under threat by the privatizers. “These wreckers who are destroying this country and destroying this government do not give a damn for veterans.”

Mark Smith an occupational therapist and President of the National Federation of Federal Employees Local 1, representing frontline VA health care workers, said that, while not perfect, the “VA delivers comprehensive publicly funded health care for over 9 million veterans and their families every day.”

Smith went on to say that corporate media does not recognize this, but the care is “world class” as reported by numerous studies that found “VA health care either matches or outperforms private sector health care in both quality and patient satisfaction, and at a lower cost to the taxpayers. It’s hard to make a profit selling the idea that publicly funded healthcare doesn’t work when the VA keeps inconveniently proving that public health care does work.”

He also accused the cooperate class of “running the same playbook… to defund VA healthcare by syphoning off resources to the public sector under the guise of choice. We have seen this in education and the postal service in degrading the services and then they demonize the understaffed and under resourced facilities as inefficient…so they dismantle the system so they can sell it off piece by piece for profit.”

He said that keeping the VA health care system out of the private sector has resulted in spillover that has trained over 70 percent of American physicians along with its publicly funded research programs that have developed treatments that we all benefit from. “The implantable pacemaker, the liver transplant, the nicotine patch, the CAT scan” and more have evolved from the VA innovations. The fourth mission of the VA is to back up the civilian health care system in a national emergency as seen during the COVID pandemic.”

Dr. Corrine Frugoni, MD, from Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), spoke of Medicare that was created to help people over 65 years of age and those with special disabilities that corporations want to privatize to “extract money out of its trillion-dollar Medicare Trust Fund.” The fund is supported through payroll taxes, general revenue sources and premiums paid by enrollees in the program meaning that everyone who has ever worked has a stake in it.

In 2020 alone, for-profit health care corporations “overbilled the fund by between $12 to $20 billion.” That amount is bigger that the budgets of several of the largest federal departments and agencies combined. They do this by dropping people who have too many medical expenses in an industry practice called “lemon dropping” and “cherry picking” by limiting care for expensive medical conditions in “underhanded ways.” They limit the number of hospitals in their network and exclude those which offer expensive care along with not covering expensive medications under Medicare Advantage.

She followed with “Insurance companies pretend to be interested in health care…but just want to extract 25 to 40 percent profit out of their investments.” Since 1970, administrators running the system have increased by “four thousand percent” while the number of physicians has only increased by approximately 50 to 100 percent.

“We don’t need more administrators,” she pointed out. The real need is for additional healthcare workers. She went on to say that BlackRock is now suing UHC for “providing too much care” for insurance holders following CEO Brian Thompson’s murder. “That’s like one evil organization going after another. Let the titans fight it out, I hope they destroy each other.”

After a short march, a second rally was held outside the building housing BlackRock headquarters where several people spoke on their commitment to see a publicly funded national single-payer medical program established for the benefit of all Americans, as a non-profit basic human right.

Report and photos by Phil Pasquini

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