Healthcare: “...To Promote the General Welfare…”

Americans spend more money per capita on healthcare than any other OECD nation, and have a life expectancy that is five years shorter than the average life expectancy of other advanced sector nations.

Hospitals are closing across the country, and rural hos­pitals in particular are being forced to eliminate important aspects of care, such as maternity wards, substance abuse centers, and home care.

In New York City, 127 individuals in need of in-patient psychiatric beds were recently housed at Rikers Island Pris­on, because area hospitals had no available beds. Since the 1950s, over 90% of psychiatric beds nationwide have been eliminated.

Letchworth Psychiatric Hospital in Rockland County. 90% of psychiactric beds nationwide have been eliminated since the 1950s.

The American healthcare crisis can only be solved in the context of an overall economic recovery plan based on Lyndon LaRouche’s Four Laws. The first problem to be ad­dressed is availability of care. The 1946 Hill–Burton Act, started from a top-down perspective of healthcare needs. It mandated up to 4.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people (up to 5.5 in rural areas). Today, the United States has only 2.35 beds per 1,000 people. A new national survey should be established to determine the number and type of hospi­tal beds required, on a county by county basis. The United States must embark on a crash program to reopen and/or modernize hundreds of hospitals nationwide. To reach the Hill–Burton standard, we would need half a million more hospital beds and over one million health care profession­als to staff them. Building this new capacity would employ about 500,000 construction workers for the next 10 years.

We need an Apollo-style crash program to develop cures for degenerative diseases using advanced scientific break­throughs in areas such as personalized, precision medicine and optical biophysics. The lack of regulation of our health insurance companies and pharmaceutical industries, and Wall Street in general, has allowed mega-corporations to put profits ahead of patients, and the quickest profit is to provide as little care as possible, while extracting the maxi­mum payment per person. The misnamed “Affordable Care Act” was designed to bail out the insurance compa­nies while looting the middle class, with subsidies going to private insurance companies instead of providing a public option. Premiums went through the roof and so did de­ductibles.

Medicare for All

From a physical economic and cultural standpoint, a health­ier workforce is a more productive workforce. Therefore, ac­cess to quality healthcare must be thought of as a crucial component of a general economic recovery of the United States. A disease- and infirmity-ridden population is ac­tually much more expensive to the nation both in terms of monetary and physical cost. HR 676 which was intro­duced in the 115th Congress “To provide for comprehen­sive health insurance coverage…” otherwise known as the “Medicare for All Program” is a straightforward and well conceived model of what must be done.

Read the Medicare for All Act proposed by the late Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (DMI-13) in 2017. This proposed legislation is a model for what we should do today.