Hank Kalet

John Nichols explains why Ralph Nader, Cornel West and other progressives are calling for a primary challenge to President Obama from the left — not to unseat him, but to ensure that antiwar, antipoverty and political reform issues are taken serious by the centrist in the White House.

The U.S. healthcare system has been broken for a long time and, while President Barack Obama and the Democrats have made changes, the health of Americans remains at the mercy of the capitalist system.

A new study issued today found that health costs have continued their steep rise, outstripping the growth in wages and leaving Americans with less money in their pockets.

A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group that tracks employer-sponsored health insurance on a yearly basis, shows that the average annual premium for family coverage through an employer reached $15,073 in 2011, an increase of 9 percent over the previous year.

“The open question is whether that’s a one-time spike or the start of a period of higher increases,” said Drew Altman, the chief executive of the Kaiser foundation.

The rising costs make getting care more expensive, of course, and also makes it difficult for businesses.

Many businesses cite the high cost of coverage as a factor in their decision not to hire, and health insurance has become increasingly unaffordable for more Americans. Over all, the cost of family coverage has about doubled since 2001, when premiums averaged $7,061, compared with a 34 percent gain in wages over the same period.

Republican critics will blame Obama for the increases, but that is shortsighted and purely political. The system has been malfunctioning for years with prices rising and healthoutcomes in decline.

Where Obama failed was in removing the one solution from the table that could have made a dent: a Canadian-style single-payer system, sometimes referred to as Medicare-for-All. Single-payer systems have lower overhead and they remove profit, which distorts the provision of care. Insurance companies make money not by improving and expanding care, but by writing policies, collecting premiums and limiting care. Medicare-for-All will require some rationing, but it will function more like triage than the purely profit-driven rationing we labor with now.

It maybe a long slog politically to make this happen, but we need to start agitating to end the insurance company greedfest that passes for the American system.

What we name things is a significant driver in what we think about those things. If we call something a flower, we value it; if we name it a weed, we spray it with insecticide and do our best to eradicate it.

The same goes for our politics: social insurance implies a positive support system; entitlements create a different sense. Taxes are theft of our hard-earned wages, and asking the wealthy to pay their fair share will kill jobs.

This is precisely the point that the economists Theodore R. Marmor and Jerry L. Mashaw make in today’s New York Times:

But there is a crucial difference between then and now: the words that our political leaders use to talk about our problems have changed. Where politicians once drew on a morally resonant language of people, family and shared social concern, they now deploy the cold technical idiom of budgetary accounting.

This is more than a superficial difference in rhetoric. It threatens to deprive us of the intellectual resources needed to address today’s problems.

The shift began in the 1960s, building out of the implicitly racist reaction to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The New Deal, with its broad supports for seniors and other aid to the poor and out of work, was popular enough to win Franklin Delano Roosevelt four terms and depended on support from southern whites.

Flash forward 30 years: LBJ — with a strong push from the civil rights movement — expands voting rights and opportunity for blacks. The South revolts and politicians like Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan follow, using a crime wave and the racism of many northern whites to recast social insurance programs as in-American and privileging blacks. The rhetorical shift took hold and, now, 40-plus years later, we view social insurance through the cold lens of budgets and deficits and the revenues that pay for required services as anti-freedom.

This rhetorical shift is tied to the larger shift in the public’s faith in the safety net and the political left’s ability to defend programs like food stamps and what’s left of welfare.

Reversing this rhetorical shift will not be easy and will require civil disobedience and a constant refrain on the part of a shrinking left commentariot to remind Americans of the absolute necessity of the social safety net.

Chris Christie should just make up his mind. Either run or don’t, but let’s end the speculative nonsense surrounding his non-candidacy.

Personally, I think all this talk is foolish — both on his part and the GOP’s– but ego will ego and the mainstream media is addicted to racehorse speculation.