‘Progressive’ senators and organizations launched an effort to revive the ‘public option’ this week to salvage the so-called Affordable Care Act (ACA). Don’t be fooled by the false label — this will benefit the healthcare profiteers, not the people.

It is critical, if we are to solve the ongoing healthcare crisis in the US, that we are not fooled by what is actually the Profiteer’s Option that will be another gift to the insurance industry. We must unite instead and fight, just as we fight to stop pipelines and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for the solution, national improved Medicare for All, a single payer system that nearly two-thirds of people in the US support.

The Affordable Care Act Is Failing

Although there has been a lot of hype saying that the Affordable Care Act would bring “universal” and “affordable” healthcare to people in the United States, experience and principles of health policy indicated from the beginning that this was false. There was so much money and energy invested in the false narrative that it was difficult for people to hear the truth. But now, six years later, the truth is being revealed. The ACA is failing and members of Congress are scrambling to fix it in a way that props up the profits of their campaign donors.

As The Polemicist writes:

“Obamacare was not designed to, and does not, provide healthcare to anyone. The subsidies it pays go to health insurance companies; not to doctors or patients. It does not, and cannot, ensure universal healthcare coverage. It can only enhance “access” to healthcare—which means actually forcing everyone to purchase whatever profitable insurance plans the private companies decide to provide, at whatever price they decide to charge.”

The premise of the ACA was to expand Medicaid coverage for the poor, continue Medicare coverage for the elderly and force the rest of the population, mostly healthy and working class, to purchase private health insurance with taxpayer subsidies. It has been a massive transfer of tax dollars into the coffers of the private insurers. On top of that, the federal government underwrote the private insurers so they would not be burdened too heavily by paying for care (most private insurers are investor-owned and have a legal obligation to yield the greatest profits possible for their investors).