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Every modern nation in the world has universal health care as a right as well as paid sick leave—every modern nation with one solitary exception—the United States. Most European countries have had some sort of health coverage for as long as the United States has been trying to get it.
Epidemiologists have warned for years that a pandemic was coming and that it would be a disaster without national health care and paid sick leave. And yet our leaders did not listen.
Now more people have been killed by the Coronavirus in America than in any other country. The death rate in America is almost 10 times that of India, a rather poor country. Over 500,000 Americans have been killed. That's a larger figure in one year than the death toll in America for all four years of World War II.
According to a study released in the British Medical Journal Lancet, in 2021, 40 percent of U.S. Covid deaths could have been avoided if we had national health insurance.
If the United States had death rates on par with other wealthy nations such as Canada and Japan, there would have been 40 percent fewer deaths attributed to COVID-19.
Did all these people in the U.S. need to die? And how many more need to die for national health insurance to become a reality in this country? 1 million? 2 million?
The Lancet study documents how several of Trump's actions made the situation worse, such as attacking the Affordable Care Act, cutting billions in Medicaid and cutting the staff of public health agencies.
However, the Lancet’s commission concludes that simply returning to pre-Trump era policies will not be enough to protect health. According to Kevin Grumbach, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, the entire system needs an “overhaul.” For starters, the U.S. should transition to a single-payer health care system like those set up in nations such as Canada that have better life expectancy. Polling shows that 56 percent of likely voters in the U.S. support Medicare for All, the single-payer proposal championed by Senator Bernie Sanders and other progressives. Support for a public option that would compete with private insurance is even higher, although many people support both. (Truth Out, 2-11-21)
LANCET ARTICLES AND STUDIES
Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era (Lancet Study, 2-10-21) You have to register on Lancet to read this
This report by the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era assesses the repercussions of President Donald Trump's health-related policies and examines the failures and social schisms that enabled his election.
New Lancet Report: 40 Percent of US COVID Deaths Could Have Been Avoided (Truth Out, 2-11-21)
If the United States had death rates on par with other wealthy nations such as Canada and Japan, there would have been 40 percent fewer deaths attributed to COVID-19 last year. In 2018 alone, an estimated 461,000 fewer people would have died if the U.S. was as healthy as France or Germany.
Medicare for All the 'Only Way Forward,' Concludes Lancet Panel in Study Detailing Death and Misery Inflicted by Trump | Common Dreams News (Common Dreams, 2-11-21)
"Trump's disastrous actions compounded longstanding failures in health policy in the USA. We know what it will take to create a healthy society. We just need the political will to do it."
A panel of policy experts and medical professionals convened to examine the healthcare legacy of Donald Trump concluded in a detailed report released Thursday morning that the former president's sweeping regulatory rollbacks and full-scale assault on America's already decimated public health infrastructure severely undermined the nation's fight against Covid-19 and caused tens of thousands of preventable deaths.
Trump’s Environment Policies Killed Thousands, Scientists Say (Bloomberg, 2-11-21)
The British medical journal The Lancet released a new report attributing 22,000 deaths in 2019 to the former president’s regulatory rollbacks.