American Insurance Exec Admits He Lied About Canadian Healthcare Sucking
We did it, everybody! We unflattened the curve! Unwashed high-fives all around. Wait. You're saying this is a bad thing? We were supposed to flatten the curve? Ah, shoot.
As it turns out, on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, we hit 31,700 infections per day, making the pandemic in this country officially worse than it has ever been. That means all of the medical horror stories we've already been experiencing are also going to ramp up in horror, like going from watching Insidious to watching Insidious Chapter 2, while also high on mescaline. Its scary stuff is what I'm saying, but it also brings me to this little reformed-demon over here:
That's Wendall Potter, a former health insurance executive who is now "coming clean" about how his industry would propagate the lie that Canada's single-payer healthcare system was ineffective in order to bolster support for privatized care. The truth of the matter is Wendall Potter has been "coming clean" about his experiences since 2008, but even though it has been 12 years in the making, it still somehow rings as too little too late.
Obviously our medical system isn't the main thing responsible for the resurgence of COVID cases. The blame there probably lies mostly at the feet of the Governors and our President, who has insisted on reopening and the people who have resisted quarantine. But the medical bankruptcy to this country and its citizens, which is sure to follow, can absolutely be blamed on a failure to adapt our medical system to modern times. According to the Financial Times:
"Interviews with hospital executives, doctors, and industry groups suggest the gulf between rich and poor institutions could widen after coronavirus. Even if stimulus money bails out poorer institutions in the short term, they will face long-term economic consequences: credit will be harder to access; they will have to cover costs when unemployed patients are unable to meet their bills and the states are likely to cut insurance payment rates as tax revenues fall."
See the problem with our privatized system during this pandemic is our medical ecosystem (paying doctors, funds for equipment, etc.) is dependent on expensive elective procedures. Those procedures aren't being performed because all of our resources are being dedicated to helping COVID patients. However, with a single-payer system such as in Canada, the fail-safes are built-in. So thank you, Wendall Potter, for exposing your lie, but if you and your pals at the insurance companies could now take the money you earned lying and help bail out the patients who will be paying COVID related medical bills for the rest of their lives, I'm sure they would appreciate it.
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Top Image: Graham Ruttan/Unsplash, Artur Tumasjan/Unsplash
