In this episode, Front Running looks at the universal healthcare proposal of Medicare4All which Bernie Sanders first made a big campaign issue in his 2016 battle against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. That forever changed the realm of possibility on the Democratic side and opened the way for radical economic ideas to be pitched to the voter.
For this episode of Front Running, Max and Stacy are joined by guests Dr. Michael Hudson, an economist and author of ‘Super Imperialism’, James Howard Kunstler, a social critic, public speaker, and author of ‘The Long Emergency’, and Randy Voller, the former mayor of Pittsboro, North Carolina, and the former head of the Democratic Party of North Carolina. Medicare for All is Wall Street central planning. Healthcare costs take up 18% of US GDP, a fact which is crippling the economy and causing widespread undue suffering and financial hardship for a wide swathe of the voting population. Front Running and their guests look at the racketeering responsible for much of the costs, which are far higher than in any other advanced economy, and also for the high rate of mortality unseen outside of war or pandemic. Dr. Michael Hudson notes that we’ve lost the distinction between value and rent. We also haven’t even tried the experiment of making healthcare providers post their costs transparently in order to rid ourselves of the nonsensical negotiation racket which plagues the Kafkaesque bureaucracy that is US healthcare. In terms of solutions so far proposed, a solution that both right and left agree on is to outsource our socialism through drug re-importation, whereby other nations with ‘socialized’ medicine negotiate lower prices for pharmaceuticals and then we in the US can then import their drugs at the better price they are able to negotiate because they are allowed to negotiate. Will the US ever join the developed world in having universal healthcare? Can a financialized system ever rid itself of predatory capitalists seeking economic rent from services like healthcare? Tune in to hear what Front Running has to say about Medicare4All and why it is considered a healthcare racket.
