This is the Tom Hartman program. program. You'll recall last week I published an op-ed saying that the Democrats should go all in on

a national health care system.

It's time to come back to Medicare for All.

The people are just fed up, you know, that health insurance premiums have just been exploding.

Rachel Madley over at Healthcare Uncovered on Substack.

It says, where does all the money we pay for health coverage actually go?

And she notes, since the Affordable Care Act was fully implemented, the average premium from

an ACA marketplace plan has doubled, and the average deductible for a silver plan has

increased by 92%.

Every year families pay more, and the coverage is thinner. So Wendell Potter looked at,

you know, what was going on here from 2014 to 2024, seven largest publicly traded health insurance

companies, United Health, CVS, Aetna, Cigna, Elevance, formerly Anthem, Humana, Centine, and Molina.

And he found that they collectively made more than one half trillion dollars in profits, not

revenue, profits, money that they just kept, a half a trillion dollars.

We are spending enough on health care, and we have been for 20 years now,

to fully fund a national health care program for every single person in America with basically

no premiums and no no deductibles. It's just crazy. They say, she said, those profits alone

could fund the enhanced ACA premium subsidies for another 10 years at a cost of an estimated $350 billion.

In the same period, these seven companies spent $146 billion buying back their own stock.

Now, when a corporation buys back stock, what it does is that money basically just becomes compensation for stockholders.

It drives up share prices.

CEOs and senior executives are compensated with stock.

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