Americans are understandably distracted by the current cultural battles that are, at their base, efforts to halt the steady erosion of White Christian male privilege. I spend a fair amount of time analyzing and discussing those battles, and ignoring a much more substantial disagreement about what a society/country owes its members/citizens.
It’s the question inherent in that old Amex commercial proclaiming “membership has its privileges.”
As I’ve noted previously, in the United States, the “privileges” of citizenship do not include health care or financial security. Our approach to social welfare has been and remains punitive–and as a result, the “systems” we’ve built incentivize greed over good works.
A recent report from the New York Times focused on the reality of America’s approach to health care.
Many hospitals in the United States use aggressive tactics to collect medical debt. They flood local courts with collections lawsuits. They garnish patients’ wages. They seize their tax refunds.
But a wealthy nonprofit health system in the Midwest is among those taking things a step further: withholding care from patients who have unpaid medical bills.
Allina Health System, which runs more than 100 hospitals and clinics in Minnesota and Wisconsin and brings in $4 billion a year in revenue, sometimes rejects patients who are deep in debt, according to internal documents and interviews with doctors, nurses and patients.
Although Allina’s hospitals will treat anyone in emergency rooms, other services can be cut off for indebted patients, including children and those with chronic illnesses like diabetes and depression. Patients aren’t allowed back until they pay off their debt entirely.
Companies like Allina–theoretically “nonprofit”– get huge tax breaks for providing indigent care in their communities. An investigation by the Times found that almost all nonprofit hospitals have– for decades– fallen short of that charitable mission.
Allina cuts off patients who owe money for services received at any of its 90 clinics. Written policies instruct staff on how to cancel appointments for patients with at least $4,500 of unpaid debt– how to lock their electronic health records so that staff can’t schedule future appointments.
“These are the poorest patients who have the most severe medical problems,” said Matt Hoffman, an Allina primary care doctor in Vadnais Heights, Minn. “These are the patients that need our care the most.”
In 2020, less than half of 1 percent of Allina’s expenditures were for charity care, well below the pathetic national average of 2 percent for “nonprofit” hospitals, despite the fact that its annual profits since 2013 have ranged from $30 million to $380 million. In 2021, its president earned $3.5 million–and it recently built a $12 million conference center.
It’s estimated that 100 million Americans have medical debts. Those debts make up approximately half of all the outstanding debt in the country, and are responsible for half of all personal bankruptcies.
Some 20 percent of hospitals nationwide have debt-collection policies that allow them to cancel care. The most expensive “health care system” in the world doesn’t seem very focused on health.
Then, of course, there’s what Jamelle Bouie calls a “twisted view” of the social safety net, most recently illustrated by the GOP’s insistence on work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries.
As Bouie notes, there’s plenty of evidence that work requirements don’t lead to more employment–that their only effect has been a loss of benefits by poor Americans.
Work requirements don’t work, but Republicans still want them, so much so that they threatened to crash the global economy to get them. Why? The obvious answer is that work requirements are an effective way to cut programs without actually cutting them. With a little extra paperwork and another layer of bureaucracy, states can keep thousands of people who qualify from getting access to benefits.
To add insult to injury, It cost states tens of millions of dollars to implement work requirements. In Arkansas, for example, implementation cost close to $26 million; in Iowa, the cost of administering the new rules was $17 million over three years — far more than the state would have spent on SNAP during that period.
We keep hearing that America is the richest country in the world. Not only could we afford to be less punitive to the people who most need a hand up, we could actually save money in the process. Tax dollars already pay some 70% of the country’s medical costs, and those dollars would probably cover 100% if CEOs weren’t overcompensated and we saved health insurer overhead.
I’ve previously argued that a Universal Basic Income would solve significant social problems– Whatever the pros and cons of a more expansive, less punitive view of “membership,” stories like these should remind us of the multiple deficits of what passes for current health and welfare policies in “rich” America.
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