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Friend,
11-year-old Teddy sold lemonade to pay for
his surgeries after being hit by a car.
7-year-old Liza set up shop in front of her
mother’s bakery, selling treats to pay for her brain
surgery.
9-year-old
Forrest raised money to pay for his father’s kidney
transplant.
Each one of
these stories was reported on by local media as a “heartwarming”
feel-good story about good-old fashioned American
resilience.
This isn’t
heartwarming. It’s a horror show.
It’s a damning condemnation of the state of
the American healthcare system – and I should
know.
Long before I
launched my first campaign for office, I served for over two decades
as a doctor of Internal Medicine.
I, too, had to navigate the labyrinth of
private insurance and the myriad of traps set by insurance executives
to wriggle out of paying for essential healthcare.
I, too, had to comfort patients who were
confronted with a diagnosis they couldn’t afford to treat – to talk
them through the gut-wrenching decisions of rationing care so their
families could afford groceries and rent.
This system is evil, and it has to
change.
The
Democratic party is still running on
“protecting” the Affordable Care Act as the solution to the healthcare
crisis in America.
In
2010, the year the ACA was signed into law, approximately 48.6 million
Americans were uninsured. Today, with all the gaps still present under
the ACA, the number of uninsured stands at an estimated 27.1
million.
That seems like
an improvement, until you realize that the combined total of uninsured
and under-insured people – 77.6 million in 2010 to 86.1 million in
2024 – has actually INCREASED.
Today, roughly 58
million Americans are considered under-insured, meaning that they have
health insurance plans so fundamentally dysfunctional that they serve
no practical use to the patient – and only serve to line the pockets
of insurance executives.
You’re probably on one of these plans – one with premiums,
deductibles, and out-of-pocket minimums so outrageous that even going
to the urgent care center for a sinus infection could land you in $1K
of medical debt.
Obama
had the chance to make the first steps towards universal healthcare
and put a public option into the ACA. Instead he caved to his donors
in the insurance industry.
Today we have MORE Americans living with medical debt in 2024
than we did before the ACA.
This is the
current reality of healthcare in America, under the Democrats’
signature healthcare policy:
- 26 million Americans still have NO health insurance at
all.
-
Up to 43% of American adults remain UNDER-insured
– meaning that your health
insurance doesn’t cover your basic medical expenses.
- 41% (or 73 MILLION) Americans are in debt for medical
bills.
- At least 68,000 Americans die every year because they
can’t access affordable healthcare.
But you know who isn’t suffering?
Health insurance companies. Their profits have nearly DOUBLED since
2010 thanks to millions of new mandatory customers on slipshod
insurance plans.
Americans spend more on healthcare than any other country on
earth for the privilege of living sicker and dying younger than ANY of
our peer nations.
But it doesn’t have to be this
way.
Universal healthcare is fully within
our grasp, and it is the only solution to the tangled mess of the
privatized American healthcare system that leaves millions falling
through the cracks.
Imagine a world where you don’t have to pay a copay to see a
doctor or collect a prescription.
Imagine a world where you don’t have to
spend hours on the phone to find out if your preferred doctor is in
network – or to get your visit covered if they’re
not.
Imagine a world
where, when you are sick, you simply go to the doctor – and they treat
you.
No deductibles. No
co-pays. No mandatory minimums and no lifetime maximums. Just
healthcare.
That
is not a wild fantasy. That is the reality in dozens of countries
around the world – and it could be our reality, too. Our campaign is
fighting to guarantee no American struggles, suffers, or dies because
they can’t get basic healthcare.
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