How to Fix the U.S.’s Ailing Healthcare System

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Do you think, both of you, that had there been a, you know, national health care system like we have in the U.K. or in other parts of Europe, coronavirus would have been dealt with in a different way? Let me ask you first, Governor Granholm, having been an executive of state.

JENNIFER GRANHOLM, FORMER MICHIGAN GOVERNOR: Yes. I mean, clearly, the fact that so many people are still uninsured and that health care is tied to work, and all these people are out of work and the gaps and the safety net that exists right now, clearly it would have been better if there had been a system like there is in the U.K. or in Canada, but we don’t have that system, unfortunately. There is an opportunity, though, to do much better by our people in this election, and the best way, I think, for progressives to get Medicare for All, for example, is to elect Joe Biden and elect as many Democrats as possible to Congress so we retake the Senate and expand the House Majority. There is no progress on health care, though, if Biden loses.

AMANPOUR: Saikat, do you — how do you answer that? But also, your two wings have been in close touch about trying to hammer out positions before the convention, before the election. Do you agree with what Governor Granholm just said, the best way to Medicare for All is to elect Joe Biden now?

SAIKAT CHAKRABARTI, FORMER CHIEF OF STAFF FOR ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Oh, absolutely. We need to, at this point, elect Joe Biden. I mean, if we have another four years of Donald Trump and Republicans running the show, we’re just going to see more and more cuts, then we’re going to see, you know, a crisis like the one we just faced. But one thing I just want to mention, you know, and I think is important to point out is, if you look at the health care industry in America today, you know, it’s about 20 percent of our total GDP gets spent on health care. It’s a huge drag on the American economy and yet, you know, we’re not able to face the coronavirus pandemic and provide people health insurance, right. And we have these situations where people are afraid to go to their doctor in the middle of a pandemic, when we most want them to go see their doctor. So, it’s not working. And why is that not working? Why do we spend so much on health care in this country and have a broken system that has lower life expectancies in most of the developed world? Is this massive lobbyist effort. You know, we — the health care industry spends more money lobbying Congress, it’s over half a billion in 2019 alone than any industry in this country. So, we have — there is this fundamental program we have to face, which is in the power of the health insurance lobbyists, the power of the health care lobbyist and the fact that they are extracting this rent, this predatory tax from the American economy. 20 percent of all of our GDP is getting sucked up out of the system, right. And so, any plan that tries to tackle in a real way the kinds of problems we face from the coronavirus and the system we have right now has to take that on head on.