Medicare For All: Democrats Push Socialized Health Care

Medicare For All: Democrats Push Socialized Health Care 

'Medicare For All': After Winning The House, Democrats Admit They Want To Socialize Health Care

• 1/09/2019

Socialized Medicine: In the midterm elections, Democrats told voters that all they wanted to do was preserve existing insurance protections in ObamaCare. But after winning the House, they revealed their true intention: to socialize health care any which way they can.

Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed on hearings for "Medicare for all," which would effectively outlaw all private insurance in favor of a single, government-run plan.
''It's a huge step forward to have the speaker's support,'' Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., head of the "Medicare for all" House caucus, told the Washington Post. ''We have to push on the inside while continuing to build support for this on the outside.''

Big 'Medicare For All' Push

This week, Rep. John Yarmuth, the new chairman of the House Budget Committee, told the Congressional Budget Office that he wants it to put together an analysis of how to create a single-payer system in the U.S.
In his letter he notes that ObamaCare — aka the Affordable Care Act — has still left tens of millions uninsured. And says that "many members of Congress are considering new approaches to achieve the goal of affordable, high-quality coverage available to everyone … and one approach that has garnered considerable interest is a single-payer system."
The goal, says Rep. Ro Khanna, is to "defend and enhance what's in the ACA, and then move towards Medicare for all."
In other words, Democrats are doing exactly what Republicans warned long ago that they would do — use ObamaCare as a steppingstone to push a complete government takeover of health care.
In case you don't know, "Medicare for all" is the brainchild of Vermont's socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.
It would amount to an unprecedented takeover of health care by the government. In Sanders' vision, it would replace all private insurance — including employer-provided plans, union-negotiated plans, even Medicare Advantage plans — with a single government program.
The promise is that all health care would be "free" — no premiums, no deductibles, no copays. That includes medical, dental, vision.

The Radical Medicare For All Plan

The cost to taxpayers for all this "free" health care? More than $32 trillion in the first decade — which is a lowball estimate.
As we've noted in this space, there is no country on earth that has gone this far. Even so-called socialist countries typically rely to some extent on private insurance and out-of-pocket spending to cover a share of the health costs. (RELATED: Health Care Reform Facts: How Does U.S. Actually Stack Up Against Other Countries?)
And even then, countries like the U.K. and Canada are plagued with shortages, delays and rationing.
Yet instead of dismissing "Medicare for all" as radical, risky, massively disruptive and unworkable, Democrats increasingly embrace it.
True, some centrist Democrats — who are endangered species these days — are trying to warn the party about jumping on this socialized-medicine bandwagon. Former Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly said that "when you talk 'Medicare for all' ... you start losing the people in my state," referring to his home state of Indiana. "The talk on the coasts just doesn't get it done in the middle."
But nobody in the party's leadership will listen.

Coastal Dems Pushing Single Payer

Speaking of the coasts, Democrats in both New York and California continue to push risky single-payer schemes on their own residents.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom campaigned on single payer and one of his first acts in office was to advocate for changes in federal rules to "allow California to develop a single-payer health system."
The state legislature already considered such a plan two years ago but ditched it once the monumental costs became apparent. (Bernie Sanders' home state of Vermont did the same years before. And Colorado voters overwhelmingly rejected a single-payer ballot initiative because of the huge taxpayer costs.)
This week, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said he plans to bring universal health coverage to the city. It would, he said, provide benefits to 600,000 uninsured in the city — whether there legally or not — for the low, low price of $100 million a year.

Laughable Cost Estimates

If that price tag — which works out to $167 a year per newly covered — seems laughably low, that's because it most assuredly is. New York spends more than $7,000 per Medicaid enrollee today. Heck, the city spends $1.5 billion a year just collecting garbage — which works out to about $170 per person.
Democrats point to polls showing what appears to be widespread approval of "Medicare for all." But those polls are meaningless, since they never explain what "Medicare for all" would entail.
Tell people that it would force everyone into government insurance. Or that it would double the size of the federal government. Or that it would lead invariably to shortages, delays and rationing. And support collapses.
That's probably why Democrats didn't make promises to socialize health care in the midterm elections. If they'd been forced to defend "Medicare for all" in swing districts, they might not be in control of the House today.