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Why didn't Obama (blue dragon representative) pass Single Payer Universal Healthcare? He campaigned on it.
Democrats controlled the votes in both houses, but they went with Romneycare instead, because "Lieberman threatened to filibuster the Senate". Even though the Republicans had no problem routing around the filibuster when passing their legislation recently.
So what was the real reason? Get your shovel, let's dig in.
Single payer saves money. The huge inefficiencies of our current system, however, are the profit centers of major US companies:
Unitedhealth
Wellpoint Inc.
Kaiser
Humana
Aetna
HCSC
Cigna
Highmark
But how much money are we talking about? Let's total up their 2017 revenue (source: any search engine), excluding Kaiser:
200 + 90 + 54 + 60 + 33 + 41 + 20 = 500 Billions paid directly to these insurance companies, from which they took billions of dollars of profit. Don't forget that they themselves are just middlemen and totally unnecessary, so their operating expenses are also waste.
A big growth in revenue came as Obamacare took effect and began requiring nearly all Americans to buy coverage. And 60% of the revenue comes from government programs Medicare/Medicaid, which has more than doubled since Obamacare.
So in reality, the Democrats under Obama decided to massively increase private insurance company revenue, rather than increase the efficiency or quality of healthcare. This is exactly the corporate oligarchy play that we should expect from both the Red Team and Blue Team if they in fact serve the wealthy and not the people.
In 2010, the year ACA was passed, the big five insurers had a revenue of $92.5 billion just from operating Medicare/Medicaid plans. By 2016 that revenue had grown to $213.1 billion. They more than doubled their revenue but only added 20% more members. That also meant that the significant majority of insurer revenue now comes directly from the government.
Prior to Kaiser being taken over by profiteers, it one point could have been considered a healthcare co-op of sorts. Back then, Kaiser's revenue in 2017 was 72 Billion to cover and provide care for 12 million members. That's only $6,000 per person per year. That's actually pretty impressive. This is almost in line with other countries like Germany, Netherlands, Austria who are around $5,300, but still falls behind Canada, France, Japan, etc. by a big amount.
BUT, Kaiser was an absolute beast of efficiency compared to the United States average at $10,000 per person per year.
If co-op Kaiser had that $500 Billion more dollars that are currently being wasted on the above seven insurance companies, they could both insure and actually provide care for 84 million more people.
The US spends more than $3.3 trillion on healthcare, or 18 percent of the GDP. Kaiser's model could provide care to all 325 million US citizens for just under $2 trillion.
You and everyone else is paying at the very least 7% of your income to healthcare vampires that do nothing to provide or improve the care people receive.
So why can't we have single payer? Why did the Obama administration and the Democrats intentionally veer away from it? Because 1.3 Trillion dollars is a lot of money, that's why. Team Blue and Team Red both serve the wealthy interests of the modern dragons (wealth hoarders), not the efficiency or effectiveness of the state. Both red and blue media constantly run misinformation about the supposed evils of single payer, creating a perpetual stream of propaganda undermining people's logical conclusion that they are being robbed.
Only the Blue Team used it as a platform issue to get votes, which is why I am picking on them this time around.
Now we have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez essentially being propped up as a punching bag for both Red and Blue teams to take some easy swings against the policy she says she represents. I mean really, what has it come to when we have Trevor Noah of all people asking her what will happen when
"you get to the capitol and have to compromise with business interests" or "how do you pay for [healthcare]"
A question to which neither of them answered with a strong plan for dealing with beyond "it needs to be a priority and we need to have courage" -- but the money is not hard to find! Why do they pretend it is? Sure we can highlight how much single-payer might cost over the next 10 years, but it is ALSO projected to cost less than our current system over the next 10 years.
So who are the holdouts in supporting single payer? Dragons. Our whole society will be wealthier, but individuals at the top would have to let go of a few pieces of gold.