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November 19, 2025


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excerpt: 

As people who even very casually followed the debate over recent decades know, health care presents problems that cannot be solved just by giving people money to buy their own healthcare or insurance. Most people are healthy and have relatively modest bills, but the problem is that some people do have serious issues and end up with very large bills.

This is the reason for insurance. Putting aside a few thousand dollars a year on your own is not going to cover the cost of heart surgery or cancer treatment. This means that both people who have health issues need insurance, and even healthy people buy insurance in the event they could be in an accident or develop a serious health issue.

Incredibly, Trump and many Republicans seem to think it’s some sort of slam that a large portion of the people on the Obamacare exchanges don’t use their insurance. This is also true with auto insurance and fire insurance. In any given year, most of us don’t use these; in fact, many of us may never use them in our lifetime. But we still mostly think it’s a good idea to have them in case we are in a bad car accident or our house burns down.

The big problem with health care insurance, which the “our friend the beaver” crowd misses, is that insurers don’t want to cover people who have major health issues. Unless the government forces them, insurers will either charge people with heart conditions or a history of cancer exorbitant premiums, or refuse to cover them altogether.

That isn’t a conspiracy theory; insurers don’t make a profit paying out large amounts of money in claims. This means that if we want people with serious health problems to be able to get insurance at an affordable price, the government has to regulate the market and limit the ability of insurers to discriminate based on pre-existing conditions.





CounterPunch+ Exclusive

BY BRADLEY KAYE

In the late twentieth century, a vibrant tradition of public intellectualism shaped American discourse, marked by figures like Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Michel Foucault. Such activist-academics did not merely reside in the halls of academia; they belonged to the world, shaping public debates and spearheading protest movements. Today, their roles appear to have faded, replaced by a quieter, more technocratic academic presence. The transformation of the university from a space of resistance to an engine for corporate labor markets is not just anecdotal but quantifiable, and its implications echo across education, culture, and society. READ MORE

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