[rad-green] It's our choice: Medicare For All, or endless war?

*https://otherwords.org/its-our-choice-medicare-for-all-or-endless-war/
<https://otherwords.org/its-our-choice-medicare-for-all-or-endless-war/>*

*Other Words | November 20, 2019*

[image: It’s Our Choice: Medicare for All, or Endless War?]

Shutterstock


*It's our choice: Medicare For All, or endless war?*
*We could easily fund health care for all by ending military boondoggles
and fruitless wars. Here’s how.*
*By Lindsay Koshgarian*

If you’re following the presidential race, you’ve heard plenty of sniping
about Medicare for All and whether we can afford it. But when it comes to
endless war or endless profits for Pentagon contractors, we’re told we
simply *must *afford it — no questions asked.

According to one study, even if universal health insurance didn’t bring
health care prices down — an unlikely worst-case scenario — we’d need an
extra $300 billion a year beyond our current spending to provide full
insurance for everyone.

Where can we find it? In a giant pot of money that’s already rampant with
waste and abuse: the Pentagon.

Right now, only about one quarter of the $738 billion Pentagon budget goes
to our troops. The rest is mainly three things: the cost of maintaining 800
military installations all over the world; lucrative Pentagon contracts,
which account for nearly half of the entire Pentagon budget; and, of
course, our never-ending wars in the Middle East.

According to my research
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/17/opinion/medicare-for-all-funding-military.html>,
if we end those wars, shut down wasteful and failing weapons programs, and
close unnecessary foreign bases, we could come up with an extra $350
billion to spend on Medicare for All — without sacrificing security.

As experts of various political stripes will tell you, the U.S. military is
carrying out a costly 20th-century security vision in a 21st century world.
For instance, the Pentagon still keeps tens of thousands of troops in
Germany and Italy. Maybe 75 years after the end of World War II (and nearly
20 years into our ill-fated Iraq adventure) is a good time to finally bring
those troops home?

Closing 60 percent of our foreign bases would save $90 billion a year.
There’d be enough left over for more than one foreign military installation
in each country on earth, if we insisted.

Right now, those bases enable our endless wars. Troops rotate from Germany
into the Middle East and Africa, and tens of thousands are stationed in the
conflict-ridden Middle East at any given time. Yet our wars have only
further destabilized the region. It’s time we brought our troops home for
good — and saved $66 billion each year in the bargain

Then there are those highly paid contractors. For instance, the F-35
fighter jet is projected to cost more than the entire military budget of
Iran. But even after many years and massive cost overruns, the lead
Pentagon tester just reported
<https://taskandpurpose.com/f35-reliability-issues> that the F-35 is still
“breaking more often than planned and taking longer to fix.”

We should halt the F-35 boondoggle, cut back on 20th century war technology
like the aircraft carrier, and freeze nuclear weapons spending, with the
eventual goal of eliminating these weapons that could wipe us all out at a
keystroke.

All told, we could cut $100 billion from outdated, ill-conceived, or
outright dangerous programs like these. The contractors will howl, but
they’ve run things long enough.

None of this is as radical as it sounds. Today, military spending is higher
than it was at the peak of the Vietnam War. Even with a $350 billion cut,
it would simply return to levels from the late 1990s.

Together with common-sense cuts to runaway overhead costs, and by rolling
current Pentagon health care costs into a universal health plan, we easily
get more than the $300 billion needed for Medicare for All.

Which would make us safer: Medicare for All or endless wars? The choice is
ours.

-- 

--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sid-l" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sid-l/CACKppcw0uLwgR058ZNg%3DbTepwcs%3DA1VnvVYKqzt16g6wnUqxDQ%40mail.gmail.com.

---
To unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]>
List help: <https://riseup.net/lists>