Should a Democrat win the White House next November and push for “Medicare for all” healthcare solution, how many debt collectors will lose their jobs, wonders a columnist for The New York Times in a recent opinion piece.
Assessing the current state of healthcare in America as “morally untenable,” the columnist looks at declining mortality rates and rising healthcare costs as two ends of a tug-of-war rope being pulled in opposite directions, which for anyone who has ever watched a “Bugs Bunny” cartoon can recall, will result in the rope breaking and those on both sides falling down and getting hurt. Nobody wins and everyone loses.
Critics of adopting a public healthcare solution in the United States point to the number of jobs that would be lost, including those in debt collection, healthcare billing, and the insurance industry. One report estimated that as many as 2 million jobs would be at risk if the United States switched to a publish healthcare system.
So what if some of these jobs involve debt collection, claims denial, aggressive legal action or are otherwise punitive, cruel or simply morally indefensible in a society that can clearly afford to provide high-quality health care to everyone? Jobs are jobs, folks, as Joe Biden might say.
Indeed, that’s exactly what Biden’s presidential campaign is saying about the Medicare for all plans that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are proposing: They “will not only cost 160 million Americans their private health coverage and force tax increases on the middle class, but it would also kill almost two million jobs,” a Biden campaign official warned recently.
Note the word “kill” in the statement. That word might better describe not what could happen to jobs under Medicare for all but what the health care industry is doing to many Americans today.
Access to a lack of quality healthcare was one of two reasons cited in a recent report from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for a decline in the mortality rate for people living in the United States (the opioid epidemic was the other).
The JAMA report points out that death rates have climbed most for middle-age adults, who — unlike retirees and many children — are not usually covered by government-run health care services and thus have less access to affordable health care.
There is a reason that nobody has come up with a solution to the healthcare crisis yet: it’s not easy and getting even a majority of people to agree on something is going to be next to impossible. But there does appear to be more momentum on this than there has ever been and the credit and collection industry should be paying close attention to how those political winds keep blowing.
