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Last night, Brewers first baseman Jake Bauers hit a two-run bomb and helped give Milwaukee a 3-0 stranglehold in their series against the Dodgers. Bauers’ at bat was really something to behold. Over the course of 6 minutes he took 11 pitches total from ace Blake Snell before finally smoking the ball to put the Brewers ahead.
After the game, Bauers was asked in an interview why he’d decided to re-sign after initially being relegated to a minor league contract. Here’s the relevant part of the exchange:
INTERVIEWER: Take us back. [It’s the] end of 2024, you’re contemplating quitting. You’ve had a nice career and [you thought I’ll] try to be a family, try to be a dad. And you were this close from what I understand. Take us through that decision and what brought you back.
BAUERS: To be completely honest the only thing that brought me back was that my wife got pregnant and I’m like ‘alright, well, we need health insurance for these kids. So that’s what brought me back…
This obviously doesn’t rank anywhere near the top when it comes to horror stories about America’s healthcare system, but I still can’t get over how completely insane it is to hear. This is an elite professional athlete talking! And it’s the guaranteed outcome of a system that links health insurance so tightly to employment. In this case, that meant that a young couple’s desire to start a family was conditional on [squints] the ability of one partner to secure a contract with a professional baseball team (and, to a lesser extent, be good enough at the sport to work his way back up from the minors).
There are only so many ways to repeat the obvious here, but tying health insurance to employment is a Dickensian horror show. It gives employers tremendous power over their workers and forces people to stay in jobs they hate or want to leave. The same is true of private health care in general. It devastates families, burdens them with crippling medical debt, and limits their ability to have children. It stops them from seeking treatment when they’re sick and makes going to the hospital an economic decision. Even among those who can afford insurance, it creates different tiers of care and inevitably means that rich people get it faster and at higher quality — which is just another way of saying the American healthcare system ascribes your life greater or lesser moral weight depending on your bank balance.
What does one even say at this point? The so-called healthcare “debate” is nothing of the kind. The leaderships of both major parties oppose healthcare that’s free, universal, and public because they’re as addicted to dead market dogmas as they are to donations from a powerful industry. The dumbest people alive will tell you that healthcare is best delivered by the marketplace and that the ability to purchase it as a commodity like any other is, in fact, the essence of freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth.
[video via @DylanTweetin]
No arguments here! And you haven’t even gotten into other middlemen involved in employer-sponsored healthcare like the companies that package the benefits for employers or pharmacy benefit “providers.”