Above photo: Dr. Anne Scheetz and Jim Rhodes lobby for universal health care. Bonnie McKeown/Contributor.
NOTE: The article was published in the April Illinois Single-Payer Coalition e-newsletter.
The Common Dreams headline: “Millions of Americans Joining the Ranks of the Uninsured Thanks to Trump-GOP Cuts in 2025.” (That is, cuts to Medicaid, and the end of premium subsidies for ACA Marketplace plans.)
The sub-heading: “New data released by KFF underscores how ‘universal, seamless coverage throughout the life course remains an urgent prerogative for the nation’ said one physician and advocate.”
The physician advocate is Dr. Adam Gaffney, former president of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), who is further quoted as calling “abhorrent” the fact that an estimated 25 million Americans are uninsured.
Nowhere does the article say that the existence of any uninsured is thanks to Republicans and Democrats together refusing to pass and implement (improved) Medicare for all.
This is only the beginning of the article’s many distortions of the narrative of what is wrong with the US healthcare system.
Medicare for all is deceptively described as “an expansion of the Medicare program to the entire US population. As millions of Americans know, Medicare as it currently exists is far from adequate to people’s needs; and, as the author of the article cannot help but know, is not what PNHP proposes.
The article describes people who cannot pay the premiums they would be charged for Marketplace plans now that subsidies have ended; a woman who has “missed the enrollment window;” people who must make sacrifices to pay for basic health care and who worry that they cannot afford emergency care.
Nowhere does the article specifically say that millions of Americans faced these problems even with Marketplace subsidies and with expanded Medicaid.
The article does not point out that KFF did not ask people the questions that would have elicited this information.
Nowhere does the article explicitly say that the Medicare for all laid out in proposed Congressional legislation would cover all residents of the US for all necessary care, under a single plan; would abolish all out-of-pocket costs including premiums; and would require enrollment only once in a lifetime.
The article tells us nothing about KFF, the organization whose polls it describes.
KFF, it is important for us to know, is a foundation (it used to be called Kaiser Family Foundation), that is it is the product of immense wealth.
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (Incite!, 2007) analyzed the dual purpose of foundations: as tax shelters that then use their money to control (or at least attempt to control: we work against them) the process of social change so that it does not impinge on the privileges of the wealthy. Foundations are thus fundamentally anti-democratic.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which analyzes media bias, has documented KFF bias against single-payer national healthcare/Medicare for all. It is essential that we be aware of this bias whenever we encounter KFF’s (mis)use of the data it collects.
