With a skyrocketing insurance premium forcing her to give up her health coverage, Melissa Garriga says she joins all the other people around the world harmed by U.S. militarism.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth finishes the installation of a Department of War plaque at the River Entrance in front of the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., on Nov. 13. (DoW /Madelyn Keech/Public Domain)
By Melissa Garriga
Codepink.org
Next year, an estimated 5 million people will be priced out of health insurance in the United States. I am one of them. When I went to renew my family’s policy, I was shocked to discover my premium had gone up to $2,600 per month, a price my household of four simply cannot afford.
For the first time in my adult life, I will be uninsured, joining the millions who have navigated this risky reality for years. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially when health insurance already makes access to healthcare costly with extremely unrealistic deductibles and high out-of-pocket costs.
Yet, as a woman in my forties with a family history of breast cancer, going without coverage is a gamble with my life. After some number-crunching, we concluded that we could afford to carry insurance for only two of the four of us. This left us with an inhuman choice: to decide whose lives we value more.
This is not just an abstract dilemma that many households are facing; it is necropolitics in action, the state-sanctioned power to decide who lives and dies. This crisis is a direct result of political choices made by those elected to serve the people and their needs.
By allowing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies to expire, our elected officials are acting as death panels, comfortable with making a decision that will kill off tens of thousands of their own constituents. This is not hyperbole; studies show that [despite allocating $1.7 trillion to public healthcare programs in 2024] over 40,000 people in the U.S. die annually due to a lack of healthcare.
Affordable Care Act rally in Miami in July 2009. (Jorge Elías/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)
However, these domestic necropolitics are merely a symptom of the U.S.’s larger death-wish: a war economy that serves weapons manufacturers whose job is to create machines of death and destruction.
As a nation, we manage to muster up trillions each year to fund global conflict and destruction while claiming the price of keeping our own alive is too much. Our government’s priorities could not be any clearer.
For example, in the recent government shutdown, the National Priorities Project reported that the Senate managed to find bipartisan unity to approve a $32 billion increase for the Pentagon as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passing it with an overwhelming 77-20 vote.
Yet, they refused to extend the healthcare subsidies for even a single year, a measure that would have cost roughly $35 billion, a well-worth sum that would keep millions, including myself, from losing their health insurance.
This is not a one-off, though. Congress passes an ever-growing Pentagon budget every year, now set to exceed a trillion dollars. The 2026 NDAA will be voted on in mid-December.
Around the same time, there are whispers of a vote on the healthcare subsidies that could save millions of families from our nightmare. However, only one of these bills is certain to pass with little debate, and it is not the one that will save lives.
To understand the deadly consequences of these priorities, consider that the annual cost of continuing the ACA subsidies is about $30 billion, or roughly $82 million per day. The daily cost of operating a single U.S. aircraft carrier is approximately $8 million.
This means that the cost of one carrier for a single day is equivalent to about 10 percent of the daily cost of providing healthcare subsidies for the entire nation.
In other words, the funds spent on one warship for just one day could instead ensure a day of healthcare access for hundreds of thousands of Americans. The math makes it clear that the U.S. government is not in the business of serving the people and their needs.
Instead, our elected officials sit in high places, callously deciding who they are willing to kill off in order protect their personal vested interest, whether it be Palestinians in Gaza, children in Sudan, boaters in Venezuela, migrants seeking a better life, or hard-working families desperately trying to make ends meet in an economy that only serves a few rather than the many.
We live in a system that values war and conflict over the protection of life, and every day they decide that it is okay for more and more of us to die. It is necropolitics, all the way down, and we are all on the chopping block. Unless…
Melissa Garriga is the communications and media analysis manager for CODEPINK. She writes about the intersection of militarism and the human cost of war.
This article is from Codepink.org.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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The only solution is getting all of the private insurance companies and other for-profit interests completely out of healthcare. That’s it. Put the providers and services in control. Governments’ only role needs to be be as the single-payer, facilitating public funds to said providers. It’s the only humane transition conceivable.
But in the meantime, the sharks and parasites will stop at nothing to keep this from happening, as is already apparent. How much abuse people are willing to take remains to be seen. Doesn’t help that so many USAmericans have been fully indoctrinated into the capitalist death cult. There are many layers of abstinence to peel through before this is even foreseeable
I totally agree. As long as our healthcare dollars are stolen to increase shareholder value, our costs will continue to go up while care is squeezed. This model is unsustainable all by itself even without the obscene levels of war funding articulated in this article. The root cause is capitalism.
Correction: *layers of obstinance.
ex.ACT.ly: “Unless …”
and until then we can only hope
that enough people will realize,
and fast enough: “it’s time to rize!”
in the meantime, our mean decision makers
could stop tax fraud in all its shapes & forms
and would have annual 3-digit billion$ to take
care of general health care, among other things.
given that THEY make up a substantial part
of the cohort of tax evaders themselves, the
likelihood of them fixing this problem on
our behalf is very close to zero … “Unless …!
The ACA and Obamacare are a disaster, and if this expedites their demise, then that is a good thing for the long run. The US needs universal healthcare, paid for by slashing the military budget and taxing the wealthy at a much, much higher rate. Until the US public starts complaining more, nothing will change. It is up to the public to demand better, because it will never be offered by the wealthy. It will require a fight where the wealthy are forced to concede. Unfortunately, I just don’t see the US public being up to the task.
No one wants to be without health insurance. But this will force us to wake from our complacency about taking care of ourselves. We’ve got to get very serious about doing whatever self-care is needed to avoid illness. And basic to this we must understand that following mainstream medical and nutritional advice will not do the trick. Do the research.
That’s fine, but people will get ill regardless
The US is making a terrible mistake in turning over healthcare to for-profit insurance companies. Obamacare from the start was a fraud in that all of it was delivered through for-profit companies. Initially they were regulated so that costs were contained, but over time those regulations disappeared and costs have sky rocketed. The government would initially cover most of the cost — truthfully the insurance companies’ profits — but eventually the subsidies would stop. And then Obamacare would cease because few people could pay the high premiums.
Medicare Advantage is taking over Medicare and soon it will mostly be privatized.
The net effect of all of this is that Americans get less healthcare and a few mega-corporations get huge profits. We are not far away from a total collapse of healthcare in the US. The real truth is that two huge institutions in the US — healthcare and war — are simply out of control. They are eating up the quality of life in the US at astonishing rates.
I’m very sorry for your family but ACA was a disaster from the very beginning. Providing subsidies to for-profit healthcare insurance companies to cover working class Americans was never going to work other than to make these companies even wealthier. The fact that the Democrats continue to push this as actual healthcare is a frightening and sick joke and again shows how far to the extreme right they have moved. (They only answer to these very same companies and their billionaire owners, who legally now bribe them and the Republicans to do their bidding.)
Until the billionaire class is taxed out of existence, their monopolies smashed, the criminals among them, like the neocons, are jailed, their political supporters sent into the wilderness, and needed/foundational public services once again returned to the public sector, nothing will change at all. And you and your family along with all the rest of us will only be offered by these imperials rulers poverty, starvation, wars, pandemics and an early death as the they laugh all the way to the bank.
I’m personally betting that nothing will change until complete disaster strikes but I’d like to be proven wrong. Unfortunately only time will tell.
The author is correct that there should be healthcare coverage for all who need it. But ACA was never free healthcare for all. Its policies were written by insurance companies. It still had premiums and deductibles. Free healthcare is just that: completely free. Even Medicare does not cover everything. Free healthcare should cover EVERYTHING. Our tax dollars should go for healthcare and education, NOT military adventurism and imperialist death.
As usual, the problem is the profit motive.
When the concept of “insurance” was developed, it was a great idea. Funds are deposited into a trust and paid out to “indemnify”, or “make whole” any member who had suffered a “loss”.
Then the Capitalists got involved!
It is my opinion that in addition to Medicare for All, the for-profit model of trust management should be declared illegal when that trust is used for medical purposes.
Medicare does not cover everything. Therefore, “Medicare for All” would not cover everything. What I support is COMPLETELY FREE TOTAL COVERAGE for all.
That’s it. Some are realizing beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is no place for the profit-motive in certain industries, particularly healthcare, but also other vital necessities like food & housing. Yet there are still many who can’t (or won’t) acknowledge this most obvious reality, that the root of so many of our problems are capitalism and the profit incentive. It is like a deeply embedded religious belief.