Bernie Sanders: A Mass Movement Can Beat Health CEO Greed

Let me just say this: it goes without saying that killing anybody — this guy happened to be a father of two kids. You don’t kill people. It’s abhorrent. I condemn it wholeheartedly. It was a terrible act.

But what it did show online is that many, many people are furious at the health insurance companies who make huge profits denying them and their families the health care that they desperately need. The stories unfold all the time: “My mother was on cancer treatment and I couldn’t get care for her. The insurance company rejected it. Some bureaucrat rejected it. She died.” Or “My kid is suffering because we can’t get the prescription drugs that we need, they rejected the doctor’s request.”

What you’re seeing, the outpouring of anger at the insurance companies, is a reflection of how people feel about the current health care system. It is broken. It is cruel. I mentioned to you: sixty thousand people a year die because they don’t get to a doctor when they should. Sixty thousand people!

And here’s another statistic that I’ll throw out, which is never talked about: it’s not only that our life expectancy is lower than virtually every other wealthy country, it’s that if you are working-class, you’re going to live five to ten years shorter than people who are wealthy. So if you’re a working-class person in this country, the stress that you live under, the economic duress that you live under, the lack of health care that you’re receiving — five to ten years shorter life than people who are rich. All of that is unacceptable. It’s an outrage, and the fact that we don’t even talk about that stuff is even more of an outrage.

So you got a system that’s broken. It’s cruel. People know it, and unfortunately, we have not had the political leadership to take on the greed of the insurance companies and drug companies and say, “You know what, we’ve got to join the rest of the world and move in a very different direction.”

The murder is absolutely abhorrent. We are not going to reform the health care system by killing people. The way we’re going to bring about the kind of fundamental changes we need in health care is, in fact, by a political movement which understands the government has got to represent all of us, not just the 1 percent. And absolutely at the very top of that list is the understanding that health care is a human right. The insanity of the situation is this is not even a question of spending more money. Right now, what the studies clearly show is that there’s so much waste and so much administrative costs and so much bureaucracy in the current system that you could, in fact, provide quality care to every man, woman, and child in this country without spending any more than the $4.4 trillion that we’re currently spending — an astronomical sum of money.

Killing people is not the way we’re going to reform our health care system. That is abhorrent and immoral. The way we’re going to reform our health care system is having people come together.

We’ve got to put that money into disease prevention, into getting more doctors and nurses, much greater focus on primary care, cutting back radically on administrative costs. The cost of administering Medicare is something like 2 percent and for private insurance companies, 12 to 14 percent. And millions and millions of dollars a year for these CEO salaries in the private sector. That is not how we should be spending health care dollars. Meanwhile, we don’t have enough doctors and nurses and dentists.

Killing people is not the way we’re going to reform our health care system. That is abhorrent and immoral. The way we’re going to reform our health care system is having people come together and understanding that it is the right of every American to be able to walk into a doctor’s office when they need to and not have to take out their wallet. Not a radical idea! It exists fifty miles away from me in Canada and exists in one form or another all over the world.

I remember talking to Europeans: “Do you know what a deductible is?” They don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about. The system is so complicated and inhumane. So my answer to that question is yes, we need a political movement. Health care is an integral part of any progressive political movement.