Adam Gaffney: Healthcare/Medicine/Single-Payer Advocacy (Azimuths)

 Gaffney, Adam. "Bill of Health: How Market Logic Hobbles Our Nation's Hospitals." The Baffler #52 (July 2020) ["The consequences of this profit-oriented financing system is a combination of deprivation and excess. That kind of inequality of health care supply has a name. In 1971, the British general practitioner Julian Tudor Hart coined a phrase, the “inverse care law,” that describes it well. “The availability of good medical care,” he wrote in The Lancet, “tends to vary inversely with the need for it in the population served.” Those who need care the most, that is to say, have the least access to it. ... As Hart noted, the “inverse care law operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces, and less so where such exposure is reduced.” As such, the inverse care law is today in operation in the United States like no other high-income nation. But we can change that. We could fund new hospitals and new health infrastructure not from profits, but from the public purse, something that the Medicare for All bills now in Congress, particularly the House version, would achieve. Hospital expansion would then be premised on the basis of health needs, not market logic."]

---. "Crisis and Opportunity." Dissent (Spring 2018) ["A society’s health—and healthcare system—serves as a window into its soul: it sheds light on the balance of class power, on political struggles long settled and still underway, and on who the society privileges and who it lets die."]

---. "A History of Putting a Price on Everything: Why policymakers calculate the cost of life and death, sickness and health." The New Republic (December 1, 2017)

 ---. "Medicare For All Is Still The Solution!" Current Affairs (February 22, 2025)   ["Dr. Adam Gaffney, the former head of Physicians For a National Health Program, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and the author of the book To Heal Humankind: The Right to Health in History. Adam is one of the most articulate and effective champions of Medicare For All, having once fought five Fox Business Channel commentators at once. Today he joins to discuss why Medicare For All is still the #1 best way we can improve people's healthcare. He responds to common objections, and Nathan challenges him with quotes from the author of the book The False Promise of Single-Payer Healthcare. Adam shows why the objections are silly and we need to build a consensus around the necessity of a single-payer plan."]

---. "'The Status Quo is Not Sustainable': : How Medicare for All Would Fill Gaps in Obamacare Coverage." Democracy Now (April 2, 2019) ["As Trump attacks the Affordable Care Act, we look at the growing case for Medicare for all. More than 100 Democratic lawmakers co-sponsored a House bill last month to dramatically revamp healthcare in the United States by creating a Medicare-for-all system funded by the federal government. The bill would expand Medicare to include dental, vision and long-term care, while making the federally run health program available to all Americans. It would also eliminate health insurance premiums, copayments and deductibles."]

---. "What the Doctors Ordered." The Baffler (February 19, 2020) ["Once opponents of universal health care, medical professionals may now help win it."]