To Make America Healthy Again, We Need to Fix Insurance

Healthcare in America is only easy for the poor and the rich. Middle-class Americans are left to struggle.

Good morning readers, and welcome to all our new subscribers. If you are new here, you probably haven’t seen me post yet. My name is Jack Buckby, I am the other half of Besides the Revolution, and I’m back after a week of rest. Aaron has kindly manned the ship while I’ve been off sick, and before I jump into some news stories for this morning’s “Besides the News,” I wanted to make a quick point about why I care so much about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. working to transform America’s food supply and improve our overall health.

In 2018, I was hospitalised with what my family has since called my “mystery illness.” No doctor could figure out what was wrong with me, and repeated trips to the hospital only ever resulted in me being sent home with pain killers. In 2020, during the pandemic, I went to the hospital in pain, only to be turned away and told that it was “too dangerous” for me to be in the hospital (which was empty, by the way, despite talk about them being overwhelmed during this period).

After seven years, and a recent flare up that left me unable to walk, I visited an Urgent Care facility here in the United States (I moved here in 2021), and by some miracle, both the nurse and doctor there recognised what was wrong with me in seconds and it looks like they were right. I’m thankful for American doctors who have finally figured it out - but I can’t say I’m thankful for America’s insurance-based system.

First let me note that no doctor has ever attempted to discuss diet with me. As far as I know, this may be a contributing factor to my illness – at least, it is for other people who suffer from the same thing. That should have been the first thing they discussed. It’s something I am conscious of now, but not something I was hugely familiar with in 2018 when I was, admittedly, quite out of shape. That’s the first failure of our system both in the United Kingdom and the United States. The second is the willingness of doctors to simply send people home with opioids.

I’m confident that Kennedy will follow through on his promise to make America’s food healthier, and hopefully he’ll encourage doctors to talk more about what we put into our bodies. But what I also hope we see during this Trump administration, if Republicans will allow him, is change to our insurance system. Let me explain my rationale, and what happened to me over the last two weeks.

In early February, I began experiencing pain and a number of symptoms that made it difficult for me to walk. I knew it was the mystery illness coming back, and so I logged into my insurance account to get my digital ID card and prepare to visit the hospital. Upon logging in, I found that I was no longer “active” on the account. My wife and child were, but I was not. I called up my insurance company, but because it was a Sunday, nobody but a third-party answering service could answer the phone.

I could only conclude that health insurance companies don’t think people have medical emergencies on Sundays. And so I waited. Rather than being seen immediately, I stayed at home because the last thing we need is a $20,000 bill from the hospital and a dispute my insurance company over it later on. And no, I’m not exaggerating – people leave the hospital with bills like this all the time. It happened just last month to my barber. So I stayed home and rested, and spent days playing telephone ping pong with my insurance company until, eventually, they conceded that they were wrong to have removed me and restored my policy. Initially, the company claimed that I had voluntarily canceled my policy in January. I had not.

Can somebody tell me why Americans are forced to make decisions about their health – among the most important decisions they will ever make – based on the whim of an insurance company that does not care about them?

When my sister-in-law has leukemia at age 21, she met others going through the same cancer treatment as her who told her horror stories of being denied coverage for life-saving care. One patient she knew died a day before her insurance company finally approved a potentially life-saving drug that she had spent months requesting.

I appreciate that this is anecdotal evidence, but I hope our readers recognise that this is not new, that there are countless other stories like this out there, and that there’s a reason 46% of Americans, as of November 2024, would prefer a government-run healthcare system.

Now, I’m from the United Kingdom – so I know how a government-run system can work, and how it can not work. Our National Health Service last functioned well in the 1990s. I recall being a child and having a large splinter in my foot. My family physician, Dr. Biswas, came to our home after hours with his doctor’s bag and removed it. He had a cup of tea with my family before leaving and heading home. The system worked because, at least at that time, Britain wasn’t overwhelmed by mass immigration that began, for the most part, in 1997 under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair. Our community was made up of people who had paid their taxes for generations, funding the healthcare system from which we all benefitted. Over the following decades, as our population grew substantially and our public services became overwhelmed by people who had not paid into the system themselves – and, indeed, whose parents and grandparents had not paid into the system – it all began to fall apart.

Getting an appointment to see a doctor in the United Kingdom is truly a battle. It requires picking up the phone at 7:59am and pressing “dial” as soon as the clock turns 8am – at which point, you are competing with dozens, if not more, of local people desperately trying to reach the local GP office to get an appointment. If you’re lucky, you’ll be put through to a receptionist who will ask you your symptoms and offer a telephone consultation with a doctor some time within the next three weeks – depending on how severe your symptoms might be. Getting treatment requires being placed on a long waiting list. It is tiresome and difficult, and nothing like it used to be.

It's why doctors in the U.K. couldn’t diagnose my condition, but the first doctors I see here in the United States caught it immediately. But what use is that if my ability to see a doctor is determined by a private company that frankly doesn’t care if I live or die?

Both of our countries have broken systems. There is clear demand from the American people for something new, and this Trump administration – which is bringing together people from both the left and the right – could be the administration to make real change. Trump himself, during his years as a Democrat, has advocated for some kind of socialized system, and he only stopped talking about it when he chose to run as a Republican. He knows, of course, that the Republican base is fiercely opposed to any kind of government-run healthcare system, and veering too far from the traditional GOP platform could have lost him his chances of winning in 2016. But it is 2025, times have changed, and the Republican Party seems to be open to bipartisanship in a way that I never would have expected before.

The U.S. doesn’t need to adopt the U.K.’s struggling system. In fact, it would probably be unwise at this point. But there is a multitude of options available to us, with many split private-government systems proving successful across Europe. Any of those systems is preferable to America’s current setup that makes it easy for only the nation’s richest and very poorest to access care. It seems to me that unless you qualify for Medicaid or have deep pockets, healthcare is painfully confusing, expensive, and likely to cause people to delay seeking the care they need to stay health.

If Trump wants to Make America Healthy Again, he would be wise to consider something more radical than simply ending Obama Care. Don’t you think?