MAYBE THERE'S NOT ENOUGH FOR-PROFIT IN MEDICINE.

Presidential aspirant Kamala Harris is taking fire from her left.  "Single-payer advocates on Monday accused Sen. Kamala Harris of hijacking the Medicare for All label to push an alternative that would fail to fundamentally overhaul America's for-profit healthcare system."

Here's what her critics understand "for-profit" to mean.

"Instead of completely replacing private coverage with a government-run, single-payer system based on traditional Medicare," the New York Times reported, "Ms. Harris would allow people to choose plans modeled on Medicare Advantage, which would be run not by the government but by private insurers."

Michael Lighty, a founding fellow at the Sanders Institute think tank and an activist with the Democratic Socialists of America's Medicare for All campaign, told Common Dreams that Harris's proposal would leave intact some of the harmful components of the profit-driven status quo.

"The alternatives put forth to single-payer Medicare for All—whether it's 'Medicare for America' or Medicare buy-ins, and now Senator Harris's alternative—rely on for-profit HMOs known as Medicare Advantage," said Lighty. "These plans restrict access to certain providers, charge seniors more for out of network care, and a receive an extra subsidy from the government."

"Hugely profitable and fast-growing, they keep insurers in charge," Lighty added. "Since under Senator Harris's plan an HMO, or other private commercial insurer, will continue to determine coverage and doctors for millions of people—and profit from denials of care—that's not healthcare as a human right."

"Networks" and third-party payment franchises are denials of opportunities to seek profit by offering trade-tested betterments.

True believers, however, have trouble recognizing that.

Splinter's Libby Watson argued in an analysis of Harris's plan Monday that there "should be no role for profit in the healthcare system, and the level of profit that insurance companies currently enjoy—the top insurers raked in more than $7 billion in profits in just one quarter last year—is obscene."

"You can either take on the insurance industry and protect patients, or you can tiptoe around them and allow them to keep profiting off patients," Watson wrote. "There's no middle ground."

Perhaps you could change the rules in such a way as to encourage insurers to compete for patients, and to encourage health care practitioners to compete in a more transparent way, rather than maintaining multiple sets of tariffs, depending on whether a patient is known to have a lot of cash, has an insurer who has negotiated favorable but not unreasonable rates, or is a Medicare or Medicaid client that might have been accepted on a slow business day.

Let me conclude this tale with a bit of Medicare arcana.  I recently signed up for Medicare, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a quarterly Part B bill.  That's right, dear reader, there are Part B premiums, which, I suspect, are invisible to many pensioners as it's possible to sign up for "Social" "Security" concurrently with Medicare, and have those Part B premiums withheld from those transfer payments.  The State of Illinois can withhold Medicare tax from employee paychecks, and from pensions of those younger than 65, but they can't (for some odd reason) withhold Part B payments.  There's also something called an Income Related Monthly Adjustment Amount, based off your adjusted gross income of two years ago.  That offers all sorts of opportunities for fooling around with the tax code.

A few weeks ago, Crazy Bernie attempted to be funny (in that condescending Democrat way) by offering some witticism about how much people like paying their insurance bills, that as a way of pushing the idea that those millionaires and billionaires and corporations would be paying for that universal Medicare.

I doubt it.  He's got that Income Related Monthly Adjustment to meddle with.

Why not try more commercial freedom, starting with interstate sales of insurance policies?