Dr. Jill Stein—a 2024 presidential candidate for the Green Party—discussed her support for a universal healthcare system during a Whole Washington forum Tuesday in Seattle.
Stein met with board members of the grassroots organization at Cornish College of the Arts. She noted that about 87 million people are either uninsured or underinsured in the U.S., while 100 million people are locked into medical debt.
“Half a million people are added to that every year, some-68,000 who die needless deaths, strictly from the lack of health insurance,” Stein said. “It’s so infuriating to see what a good thing (universal healthcare) is, how much support it has right now—and has had—yet year after year, we are stymied by our political system.”
Stein is an internal medicine doctor, and her experiences working in the field served as a primary reason she got into politics.
“I moved from clinical medicine to political medicine to address our sick political system, the mother of all illnesses that we must fix in order to fix all the other diseases that ail us,” she said. “That’s still very much my feeling today, where I feel like the work of Whole Washington is so critical to keep moving the needle forward. But meanwhile, our health in the U.S. has been seriously compromised. It not only fails to support our health, it actually drives our illnesses.”
Medicare for All would save the country almost half a trillion dollars every year, Stein noted, while covering everyone, and providing services that cover people from head to toe.
“From cradle to grave, [it covers] your eyeglasses, your mental health, your chronic healthcare, all of that, and it still saves us about a trillion dollars a year,” she said. “[That] is what we would save by curtailing the paper pushing, red tape, profiteering, and the advertisements, and all that gets added into our healthcare bills.”
Jason Call—who is running for U.S. representative in Washington’s Second Congressional District and is Stein’s campaign manager—said universal healthcare would also save employers money.
“If we just taxed employers less than they’re being taxed right now for payroll taxes, if we taxed everybody—especially the wealthy—a small percentage, and had that go to healthcare to cover everybody across the board, benefits will be reaped by those employers by having a healthy workforce.”
— Call
The Congressional Budget Office did a study that stated that the U.S. would save over $400 billion annually with single-payer variants, Call said.
“Part of that is having people who are healthier, who could go and be productive in our economy,” he said. “Whereas, today when you’re sick and you don’t get healthcare, you absorb more resources, you languish more, and can’t be put back in the economy. There’s a societal benefit to being healthy, but the economic benefits should not be overlooked.”
Stein talked about the health impacts poverty has on Americans, noting that poverty is the fourth greatest cause of U.S. deaths.
“The lower 50 percent of the American population has two percent of the wealth,” Stein said. “The upper one percent has about 33-36 percent of wealth. It doesn’t have to be that way. We’ve been granting tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy for decades.”
Corporations now pay approximately one percent of gross domestic product, Stein said, compared to about six percent in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
“So effectively, corporate taxes have been slashed six-fold, and this has been done by Democrats and Republicans over and over again. That’s another way in which we are made sick, because the inequities are horribly disruptive and generate illness. As a healthcare provider, I felt this incredible sense of outrage seeing people come into the clinic over and over again with diseases—whether it’s cancer, a diabetic onset crisis, or asthma—there’s so many things which could be prevented at the community level.”
— Stein
Call, a Whole Washington board member, noted that the country’s poorest and most vulnerable people suffer the most from healthcare disparities.
“Rich people in this country can go see a doctor because, even if they didn’t have insurance, they would have the cash resources to cover medical bills,” Call said. “That is not the case for 50 percent or more of the people in this country. So we are leaving people to suffer and die. Health care is a human right.”
If Stein were to become president, one of the first things she would do would be to declare a health and healthcare emergency, she said.
“Our team is exploring exactly what these various emergency pieces of legislation would allow us to do on healthcare; the funds it would make available, what kind of transition we could begin to invoke,” she said. “One thing is for sure, the American people already support this. What would goal No. 1 be? In all likelihood, it would be a single-payer system because it has enormous support.
That and campaign finance reform are probably the two most widely supported issues across the entire political spectrum. And we would begin by holding our congressmen and women—and senators accountable—holding town hall meetings, and applying pressure so they know their job depends on passing Medicare for All. And there’s no wiggle room out of this.”
Carey Wallace, board chair at Whole Washington, is a nurse, and spoke about the country’s current health system from that perspective.
“I’ve been a nurse for a long time,” Wallace said. “A lot of us are fed up watching patients and family members suffer under the system that currently exists.”
Kathryn Lewandowski, vice chair of the Whole Washington board, has been a registered nurse for 38 years, and echoed Wallace’s thoughts.
“As a nurse, we see how our really bad healthcare system is impacting our nurses. It only took me about five years in healthcare to realize that we were wasting so much money. And that is what really drives me because we have so much potential to save money, and be able to redirect that money to places that can continue to help people, and keep them housed (and) fed. It’s wrong that we are profiting off the illnesses of our families.”
— Lewandowski
Whole Washington has plans to run another ballot initiative, potentially in 2025, to get universal healthcare on the ballot, Wallace said.
“The work we’re doing is bringing urgency to the table,” Wallace said. “This spring and summer, we’re going to be hosting a series of public, nonpartisan town halls all over the state to make sure people know we exist and, hopefully, activate them to help do something differently, to help us collect signatures when we get that running.”
Whole Washington Executive Director Andre Stackhouse noted that Whole Washington has run three ballot initiatives.
“We have yet to make the ballot because it takes an incredible grassroots effort to get something on the ballot statewide without taking enormous amounts of money from major donors or industry interests,” Stackhouse said. “So if you want to get a very clean and principled version of universal healthcare on the ballot, you’re talking about raising a lot of money from small donors. And you’re talking about coordinating a major ground game across an entire state.”
Whole Washington is working with the state’s Universal Health Care Commission—which was created with the passage of Senate Bill 5399 in 2021 to make healthcare more accessible and affordable for residents—and will conduct a third presentation for the commission during its next meeting, Stackhouse said.
“I don’t think we’ll have achieved real universal healthcare until we address the enormous waste in private spending, the enormous amount of influence the industry has on the entire conversation,” he said. “That is often the conversation we are kind of tiptoeing around. As we build this movement, as we make this progress, we need to be more explicit about that. That is going to mean a very significant restructuring to how it is financed for the vast majority of people. I think that is something the people of Washington are ready for.”