BLOG: Personal note: holiday reflection on US & Canada events & a thank you

Posted: December 23, 2024

(December 23, 2024)

As I sit down to write a holiday message to you that I hope has some meaning, I am thinking about a couple of ground shaking events that have happened in the last few weeks, one in the U.S. and one here.

In the United States, Luigi Mangione has been charged in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson. The assassination-style killing has provoked an outpouring from the American public. MEMEs (internet graphics) and videos abound. All over the internet are new folk songs written about Luigi. People have taken to inserting Luigi into photos at their work, school, or home, to provide him with an alibi. Photos have been altered to look like stills from Mission Impossible: there’s Luigi, alert, svelte, young, almost impossibly tidy in his orange jumpsuit, highlit against a phalanx of police escorting him out of a helicopter overlaid with a soundtrack of pumping hip-hop.

Luigi has become a cultural hero.

It is no wonder. Forbes reported that UnitedHealthcare denies more claims than other health insurance companies in the U.S. —  rejecting up to one-third of claims the magazine says. Similar reports have gone viral. (The company denies them.) Thompson — the CEO who was killed — made of $10.2 million annually, including salary, bonus and stock  options. UnitedHealthcare, part of the giant conglomerate UnitedHealth Group, reported more than $16 billion in operating profits last year. That’s $16,000,000,000 in profits. Making millions (or billions) from denying health care to people has them angry. Beyond angry. This week’s events have tapped a vein of seething fury in America, uniting people across political lines in a country that is deeply divided.

In the United States, medical costs are the number one reason for bankruptcy. Fifty-six million people struggle with medical debt each year. That’s more than the entire population of Canada. Ninety percent of them took out a second mortgage on their home to pay their medical bills. Eleven million people last year ran up high interest debt on their credit cards to pay medical bills. The cost of (usurious) interest on those cards will leave them in a cycle of debt for years, if not for life.

Last week also, public outcry had Anthem Blue Shield reverse a decision to limit coverage for anesthesia during surgeries and other procedures. Their plan was to cease insurance coverage after a recommended duration of time for that type of surgery. Connecticut’s Democratic Senator Chris Murphy expressed the outrage of his constituents: “Saddling patients with thousands of dollars in surprise additional medical debt. And for what? Just to boost corporate profits?….Reverse this decision immediately.”

Here in Canada, we watched the explosive resignation of Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland after a dispute with the Prime Minister’s Office. Reportedly, Freeland and the PMO disagreed over what she described as the HST tax holiday gimmick in the face of an economic statement that reported a $61.9 billion deficit. Leaked to the Globe and Mail was another claim that the Prime Minister’s people were of the opinion that Freeland was unable to articulate the government’s economic plans effectively. Whether it is the fault of the Finance Minister, the Prime Minister ( and/or the media, the opposition parties, the silent social movements in Canada…) it is definitely worrisome to me that Canadians do not have a clear picture of the economic choices ahead of us.

The government reports about $20 billion of that deficit is one-time spending for Indigenous land and other claims currently in court and special COVID payments. After these, the deficit will be in the $40 billion range. I note this in particular because a few years ago I was writing a report and I remember looking back at the Harper years in government, and trying to calculate the total of his corporate and income tax cuts. Bottom line? Harper’s tax cuts took $41 billion per year out of federal revenues as of 2015. That is per year, each year then and since. It is even more per year in today’s dollars.

Lest you think that you benefited from those tax cuts, let’s take a closer look at the actual evidence. Corporate tax cuts are usually justified as attracting business investment and funding productivity gains, but in fact these tax cuts have resulted in more than $700 billion in corporate “dead money” not going to anything that benefits the public. In fact, Harper’s record was the worst since prior to World War II on key economic indicators including job creation and corporate investment. Furthermore, income tax cuts virtually always benefit the highest income earners. Remember, income taxes are indexed. That means, the highest income earners pay the most and the rate of tax goes down as the level of income is less. Income taxes redistribute money from the highest income to the middle class and poorest. Under analysis, almost 80 percent of the Harper government income tax cuts went to the highest 15 percent of income earners.

Years ago, economists Richard Shillington and Hugh Mackenzie calculated the value of public services to the median (dead in the middle) income household. They found the value to that household to be $41,000 (in 2009). In today’s dollars that would be more than $60,000 per year for each household. Their point? Funding public services is a net gain to most of us, not a take away.

You may be wondering what this has to do with health care. The answer is taxes have everything to do with health care. Canada created our public health insurance for all in the 1960s because people couldn’t afford health care on their own. As Justice Emmett Hall famously said:

“As a society, [we] are aware that the trauma of illness, the pain of surgery, the slow decline to death, are burdens enough for the human being to bear without the added burden of medical or hospital bills penalizing the patient at the moment of vulnerability. The Canadian people determined that they should band together to pay medical bills and hospital bills when they were well and income earning. Health services [are] a fundamental need, like education, which Canadians could meet collectively and pay for through taxes.”  Justice Emmett Hall, Chair of the Royal Commission on Medical Services (that resulted in the 1968 passage of the Medical Care Act and

The Canada Health Act, passed in 1984, banned extra user fees on patients for medically needed hospital and physician services. We do not have millions of people going bankrupt to pay medical bills because we have public health insurance – paid by taxes. We do not have profiteering insurance companies denying claims to make billions in profit from the sick and the dying.