The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Margaret Flowers

The national emergency and public health emergency declarations related to the COVID-19 pandemic will terminate on May 11, 2023. These emergency declarations, in place since 2020, waived or modified requirements in a range of areas, including in the Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP programs, as well as in private health insurance. The end of these special measures will see between 5 and 14 million Americans lose their Medicaid coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. More than 30 million Americans already don’t have health insurance and millions more are underinsured. Even with insurance, medical costs are so high that medical bills cause of bankruptcy for half a million people each year in the United States, the number one cause of bankruptcy. The average American spends more than $12,500 per year on personal health care, some $ 4 trillion annually. A citizen in France spends $5,468, on Canada $5,905, and on Germany $7,382 for universal care to it citizens. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that, despite the high cost of U.S. health care, on nearly every critical ranking, from life expectancy at birth and deaths from avoidable conditions, the U.S. is consistently at the bottom. 68,000 Americans die every year because they are uninsured or under-insured. This is because the U.S. health care system does not serve the public. It serves the medical, insurance and drug companies whose lobbyists gut regulations and block health care reform. In 2020, the CEOs of 178 major health care companies collectively made $3.2 billion in total compensation – up 31% from 2019 – all in the midst of the pandemic. According to Axios, in 2020, the CEO of Cigna, David Cordani, took home $79 million; the CEO of Centene, Michael Neidorff, made $59 million; and the CEO of UnitedHealth Group, Dave Wichmann, received $42 million in total compensation. The CEO of Moderna got a $926 million golden parachute after his company received $2.5 billion in taxpayer dollars from the Trump Administration to develop its COVID vaccine. These huge profits were being made when over 330,000 Americans died during the pandemic because they could not afford to go to a doctor on time. Joining me to discuss the debacle that is the U.S. health care system is Dr. Margaret Flowers an adviser to the board of Physicians for a National Health Program and one of the nation’s most prominent advocates for single payer health insurance.