Single-Payer Healthcare Advocates Call for Action Against Trump Policies

Radio Sputnik's Brian Becker invited Margaret Flowers, a pediatrician and single-payer health care advocate, to discuss possible alternatives to Obamacare, a system that Democrats are going to fight "tooth and nail" to protect, according to Senator Chuck Schumer.

​According to Flowers, the ‘free-market' health-care policies that President-elect Trump campaigned for are, at first, about "undermining Medicare and Medicaid." The former of the two programs is aimed at providing medical care to the elderly and works as a form of voluntarily insurance. The latter, though, is a social safety net, providing medical care for those who live below the poverty line. Trump's policies will severely limit the amount of state funds provided to Medicaid, according to Flowers.

She also observed that Trump's idea that medical insurance will no longer be bound by state boundaries, effectively allows insurance companies to move their business to tax-haven states with the most friendly legislation.

According to Flowers, problems with America's extremely expensive and disorganized healthcare system will not be solved until people and state officials understand that healthcare must be considered a right, not a commodity.

"That's how the United States is different from any other industrialized nation — we treat healthcare as a commodity, so that people are only able to get as much healthcare as they can afford, rather than get the amount of care they need," she says.

"Other countries treat it like public good — like education, libraries, roads to drive on."

Currently, the US healthcare system is dominated by insurance companies, who could become even more powerful under a Trump administration, she says. And insurance companies, she points out, exist only to maximize profit, and so spend enormous amounts of energy denying health-care claims.

She detailed to host Becker that when she and her colleagues audited the major insurance companies in her home state of Maryland, it became clear that insurance agents "took one of every five claims and threw them into a trash can, because they knew nobody was going to hold them accountable for doing that."

"We had nearly 50 million people in the United States with no insurance at all [recently]," Flowers said, adding, "That lowered to some 30 million people [under Obamacare] but we don't expect it to drop any further. In fact, under the new administration we expect [this number] to skyrocket."

Flowers, a strong advocate of single-payer healthcare — a system in which the state pays for everyone's health-care from money gathered as taxes — actively campaigned for the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, in 2010. She believes this is the right time for the American people to join forces and fight for a single-payer system, as any other solution will be a half measure.