I just wrote about CNN Fight Night providing more heat than light.  I want to touch on the political nonsense and noise around the healthcare industrial complex.  For whatever reason, nobody tells that story well.

The healthcare industrial complex in America is a complicated mix that covers a chunk of our economy.  I’m a little surprised that CNN didn’t understand the size and scope.  But only a little.  Healthcare is arguably the biggest Democratic issue, but the CNN moderators never moved beyond political talking points.

I’m disappointed by CNN, but I’m shocked how some Democrats traded on people’s ignorance.  The moderators didn’t have to struggle to get candidates to trumpet crud like, “How much are you suggesting we raise taxes to pay for your healthcare plan?!?  It will cost taxpayers three trillion dollars! Who will pay for that!”  They all took turns lazily tossing around Official Big Numbers as their ‘proof.’  Almost nobody put any of it in perspective.

Here’s a quick summary. The healthcare-industrial complex has been slowly consuming our economy.  It used to be much smaller, but as of 2017, it sucked down almost 18 percent of our economy. With a $20 trillion GDP, we spent $3.5 trillion just on healthcare.  And that share isn’t just rising in dollars, the percentage has been growing as well. We expect healthcare to eat closer to 20 percent of the GDP by 2020. So that’s the scale we’re talking about. Every other industrialized country spends much less of their wealth, covers more of their people, and gives them better healthcare. Every single one.

So that’s the rough size of it.  That makes some calculations simpler.  Biden criticized Kamala Harris’s healthcare plan because it would cost the American economy $3 trillion annually!  (At some point, $3 trillion morphed into $30 trillion; anyone know why?) In reality, $3 trillion a year is a freakin’ good deal! We’d be saving a ton. And Biden’s rebuttal? That his plan is only $760 billion, and it’s less disruptive?  Either Biden is nuts, or he’s hiding tons of money somewhere.  This isn’t higher math; it’s arithmetic.

And let’s look at another Republican attack point.  “Democrats will take away your insurance!”  I hated how the moderators got Democrats to attack each other using that same junk.  “Under his plan, you’ll lose your employer insurance!” or “She’d make private health insurance illegal!”  They use all those exclamation points because it scares people, but it’s nonsense underneath.  People like their doctors, mostly. Nobody is making doctors illegal except maybe Trump.  Every Democrat is talking about changing how we pay our doctors and hospitals. That’s the head office. You know, the people you call on the phone to ask why your ambulance trip will cost you two grand out of pocket? To hear them talk, CNN and some Democratic candidates worry people are clamoring to keep their insurance administrators in new Guccis. I’m betting that’s not a big crowd.

As a counterpoint, let me point to Kaiser Permanente.  I have my quibbles about parts of their model, but I love how they put a bunch of medical services in each facility.  If I need a few tests, I don’t have to make five appointments on three different days, taking off from work and finding a sitter each time to drive all over creation. Competition can sometimes cough up a better service model.

So, I like markets and choices. No, I’m not married to my insurance company. I suspect that’s how most people feel. We want to care when we get sick. We want doctors and services we like, without jumping through administrative hoops. Most of all, we don’t want a system that sucks down all our wealth, leaving us destitute and discarded, just because we got sick or old. It’s not complicated.

But we didn’t get much explanation of that from the CNN fight night version of debates, did we? Funny about that.