Jon Tester’s Senate campaign has been making hay out of remarks Republican opponent Tim Sheehy made last year about healthcare.
Semafor obtained an audio recording of remarks Sheehy made at a meet-and-greet in Glasgow in August 2023. “In my opinion,” Sheehy said, “we need to return healthcare to pure privatization.”
He added, “Healthcare worked before health insurance existed. Each town had a doctor that would drive to your house, take care of you and you’d pay him. And guess what? It worked.”
Yes, kiddies, it’s true. Our doctor used to make house calls, and he would give us children plastic action figures if we were good, which we always were. And milkmen used to deliver to front doorsteps, TV repairmen would come to your house to replace burned-out tubes, and watermelons used to be full of big, black seeds. Now hush and let Grandpa finish his story.
In an email to Semafor, the Sheehy campaign said he was attacking insurance companies and “acknowledging our health care system is broken.” The campaign added that Sheehy believes there needs to be “greater transparency, competition and shopping for services in our health care system.”
That’s pretty much what Sheehy said for the Montana Free Press’ election guide, and also what is posted on the issues portion of his website. Great ideas!
But as usual with Sheehy, the details are vague. His opinion piece in Sunday’s Billings Gazette, for instance, accused Tester of lying about him, but Sheehy failed to provide even one example of an actual lie.
He also said that Tester has attacked his military record, a claim for which I have been unable to find evidence. Instead, Sheehy attacked Tester’s lack of a military record, failing to mention that Tester was disqualified from service because of fingers lost in a meat-cutting accident years ago. Instead, he grew up playing “Taps” at funerals for veterans.
Anyway, Sheehy has a point that U.S. healthcare is broken. According to an analysis of 17 nations by World Health Systems Facts, the U.S. covers the lowest percentage of its population with healthcare, has the highest healthcare costs per capita and spends the most as a percentage of GDP. Only Hungary has a shorter average life span, and only Costa Rica has a higher infant mortality rate.
Sheehy claims without offering evidence that Obamacare has made things worse. Healthcare costs in the United States reached 17.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 2009, according to government figures. Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, and most of its provisions did not take effect until 2014. In 2022, the latest year for which I could find figures, healthcare cost 17.3 percent of GDP. What a disaster.
According to the Washington Post, U.S. healthcare premiums increased 69 percent from 2000 to 2005. In no five-year period since then has the growth rate exceeded 27 percent. If total annual healthcare costs for a family of four had increased as rapidly since the passage of the ACA as they did in the five years before it passed, that family would be paying twice as much for healthcare as they do now.
Here, the Montana Independent cites a 2023 Kaiser Family Foundation analysis that the Affordable Care Act allowed 117,000 Montanans to get Medicaid coverage. Another 66,000 people had purchased insurance plans through the federal exchange as of early 2024.
Moreover, Sheehy says he would protect Medicare and continue to require coverage for Montanans with pre-existing conditions. How Sheehy plans to persuade private companies to insure people whose coverage will lose them money he does not explain.
And if you think we had better medical care when I was a child than we do now, then you should see a doctor. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, patents for U.S. pharmaceutical and surgical innovations increased by a factor of six just between 1974 and 2010.
That all cost money, but 45 million Americans had no health insurance in 2011. Obamacare was a small, imperfect and complex effort to deal with a gigantic problem.
Republicans have been picking on Kamala Harris for failing to disclose a full-blown campaign platform in the weeks since she became the Democratic candidate. Sheehy launched his campaign more than a year ago.
Maybe it’s time he told us what he really thinks.
Between the lines is a weekly column written in the Yellowstone County News by David Crisp.
