Under Assault: teaching in NYC: Medicare for All

On Jimmie Kimmel show, Oct. 24, 2019:
YouTube video, begin 07:02:

“People make this more complicated than it really is. Medicare right now is the most popular healthcare program in America. I want to expand Medicare to include dental care, hearing aids, and eyeglasses, and then what I want to do is lower the

eligibility age first year from 65 down to 55, then to 45, then to 35, and then we cover everybody. And when we do that, there are no more premiums! You’re not paying any more premiums, no more copayments, no more deductibles, no more out of pocket expenses. And virtually every person in this country will save money on healthcare …

"The function of the healthcare system today — shock of all shocks— is to make the drug companies and the insurance companies incredibly rich. Well, I don’t think that’s the function of healthcare …

Just as an example, if somebody who is self-employed today is paying $15, $20,000 a year in premiums and out of pocket expenses, that’s all gone. Well, they may pay $7 or $8,000 more in taxes. They’re $12,000 to the good. And that’s what we have got to do. We have to do what every other country does is make sure that anybody can go to any doctor they want, whenever they want, and not worry about the cost of healthcare."

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RESOURCES

National Nurses United (NNU): flyers for download

Download from the link various flyers on City Council resolutions, details of the House and Senate versions of the bill, summary of the bills, FAQ, Q&A, Myths v. Facts (in Eng. and Sp.)

PublicCitizen's summary and flyers:

The Case for Medicare-for-All (69 pages)

Flyer — M4All would cost less while covering more

Flyer — M4All would end fear of medical bills or losing coverage

Flyer — M4All would improve health care for families and providers

Flyer — M4All is commonsense and achievable

PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program)

"Stop fearmongering about 'Medicare for All,'" by Donald Berwick (article, Oct. 22, 2019)

"Medicare for All explained," interviews with Kristen Grimm (podcasts, pt.1 Oct. 1, 2019; pt.2 Oct 15, 2019)

"What the health care debate still gets wrong," by Adam Gaffney (article, Oct. 17, 2019)

It turns out that the real cost problem, all along, has been the other half of the spending equation: not the quantity of medical services rendered, but the prices paid by insurers for each unit of care provided.
"The public option on health care is a poison pill," by David Himmelstein (article, Oct. 7, 2019)

But the case for a public option rests on faulty economic logic and naive assumptions about how private insurance actually works. Private insurers have proved endlessly creative at gaming the system to avoid fair competition, and they have used their immense lobbying clout to undermine regulators’ efforts to rein in their abuses. That’s enabled them to siphon hundreds of billions of dollars out of the health care system each year for their own profits and overhead costs while forcing doctors and hospitals to waste billions more on billing-related paperwork...

Public option proposals come in three main varieties . . . No working models of the [1] buy-in or [2] pay-or-play public option variants currently exist in the United States or elsewhere. But decades of experience with [3] Medicare Advantage offer lessons about that program and how private insurers capture profits for themselves and push losses onto their public rival—strategies that allow them to win the competition while driving up everyone’s costs.

Private insurers employ a dizzying array of profit-enhancing schemes ... • Obstructing expensive care ... • Cherry-picking and lemon-dropping ... • Upcoding, or making enrollees look sicker on paper than they really are to inflate risk-adjusted premiums. By applying serious-sounding diagnoses to minor illnesses, Medicare Advantage plans artificially inflate the premiums they collect from taxpayers by billions of dollars while adding little or nothing to their expenditures for care. • Lobbying to get excessive payments and thwart regulators.

Senator Bernie Sanders on Medicare for All

Options to finance Medicare for All

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal on Medicare for All

Website

The author of this blog

UA retired from teaching after 24 years, having built more than a couple of dozen school choruses and conducted them in well over 100 concerts. Her absences have been infrequent, her ratings satisfactory, and she teaches with enthusiasm. In some years, up to 450 students have passed through her classroom each school year.

UA was a musicologist before she became a teacher and held the position of senior staff editor on the world's largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia of music (The New Grove Dictionary of Music, 29 vols.). She is known for her scholarly work on some of the longest (and most tedious) bibliographical articles in the main work and the subsequent offshoot reference books. She also trained as a coloratura in New York, London and Italy, and has a working knowledge of several other languages.

After a flirtation with rumba and tango, UA wrote a play on ballroom partner dancing called Real Changes, which makes side trips into Zen, intellectualism/eroticism, tragedy/comedy, a parody of Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, Nietzsche's early works, and nirvana. (She is still not clear which of these should dominate the psyche, but is happy to have spent four years trying to find out.

Before her recent retirement, UA thought she could pass the remaining years of her career in relative calm. But this was not to be. She was excessed for the second time in her career and was for a year and a half a sub, or in the vernacular, an ATR. A successful grievance restored her to a position, but a principal has many ways to keep someone squirming. Teaching fully out of license was one of them, during which time she lost her desire to teach at all.

It is very hard to tell whether she was excessed in that period because her subject is music (which is not particularly respected in this school system), or because she was becoming too old, too expensive, or too ... "vocal."