by Eliot Chandler

Created on: April 08, 2009   Last Updated: April 09, 2009

Healthcare: Offer Americans a Choice

Private, for-profit, insurers spend more than 15 percent of collected premiums on administrative costs, where Medicare's are only about 2 percent. And a universal Medicare system would not need to spend money on advertising or marketing For-profit insurers are fighting the idea of Medicare-for-all, privately seeing it as having these unfair advantages, but publicly attacking it as "socialism." They also recognize the tremendous advantage of providing an expanded Medicare program, economically, as a benefit to businesses, large and small, by removing the cost of health coverage from the shoulders of employers. Small business companies are having to abandon offering for-profit insurance to their employees. Many big businesses are also in trouble; General Motors, for instance, has a deficit of over $50 billion in its health care fund, and is considering cutting coverage in an attempt to forstall bankruptcy. Nicholas Kristof wrote that "American businesses are at a competitive disadvantage when they have to pay for health care and foreign companies don't Those opposed to expanded Medicare are attempting to rewrite the history of the thirties, saying that FDR's New Deal had nothing to do with bringing the country out of the depression, that it really was World War II. Others claimed that Roosevelt caused it. Actually, the depression began long before FDR won the election. The opposition in the 30s was agreed that the President's spending money on all his New Deal programs was the wrong approach, just as they are saying today.

Relief, they claimed, could only be brought about by laissez faire and cutting taxes. FDRs attempts to reverse the depression by pumping millions of dollars into programs like the WPA and CCC in order to get people working again did begin to take effect, but very slowly.
By 1937 there was significant progress, and the government then convinced the President to stop spending more money that it didn't have. As a result the country dropped back into recession and the Lend Lease' war production did finally end the crisis. Charles Geisst, financial historian of Manhattan College wrote, "The right would use socialist' against Franklin Roosevelt all the time in the 1930s. To hear him referred to as Comrade Roosevelt during that period was not unusual."
President Obama is now being accused of promoting "European-style socialism," even though he appears to have succumbed to conservative dictates in regards to healthcare.

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