The Editorial Board of Investors Business Daily shows their gratitude to Bernie Sanders
Health Reform: For decades the left has been pushing “single payer†health care without ever coming clean about how much it would cost. Now, thanks to Bernie Sanders, we have our answer. And the price tag is mind-boggling.
Sanders’ plan would eliminate private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare in favor of a single, government-run program, which he calls “Medicare for all.†There’d be no out-of-pocket costs for health care and long-term care.
When he released his plan, Sanders claimed it would cost about $14 trillion over 10 years. But not to worry, he said, since it would be fully paid for by the rich, and the middle class, and the working class, who would all see their taxes go up.
However, a new study from the liberal Urban Institute says that Sanders’s plan would cost more than twice what he says.
Under Bernie’s plan, Los Federales would pay all costs for the consumers, state governments, and local governments. The real price tag? $32 trillion over 10 years. The direct costs would be shifted to the federal government, but, the money has to come from somewhere, so, taxes and fees will go up somewhere, and services will go down.
The idea that a central government can plan 1/6th of the economy better than the private sector, for example, is belied by every other attempt at socialism.
And anyone who thinks health care quality would improve just needs to look at the string of calamities in Canada, the U.K. or the single-payer Veterans Health Administration, which are each characterized by massive waste, chronic delays, doctor strikes, lack of innovation and worse outcomes for specific diseases.
Doctors strikes. Seems ridiculous, right? Doctors don’t strike. They wouldn’t walk off the job like auto or communications workers, leaving sick people in danger, right? Except, they did just that in England. And Nigeria.
Give Sanders credit for exposing the enormous cost of the left’s socialist dreams. And give him credit for making it clear how extreme the Democratic Party, which made Sanders a serious contender for the nomination, has become.
While Bernie is the one pushing this all right now the hardest, don’t think he is the only one who wants it. Certainly Hillary and the rest of the Democrats want single payer. They should all be careful what they wish for, because they might get it. Or, to put it another way, with my favorite Obamacare quote of all time
“I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today,” Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.
“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”
“Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.”
Perfectly encapsulates the Liberal position: they always want Someone Else to pay for their policies, and are upset when they are hoist on their own petard.
Crossed at Right Wing News.
Teach did you have a chance to read the article from which Vinson was quoted?
Perhaps you Coukd post a link after reading all of it
Or a link to Gallup’s poll about people’s approval of Obamacare
In your comparisons of foreign socialized medicine you always seem to compare to theorist not the best such as Germany ircSwitzerland. There they receive excellent healthcare and spend much less of their GNP to get better results
In a free market would caregivers be able to charge accident victims whatever they wished ?
In theory, people who are now actually paying for health insurance would be better off. Yeah, their taxes would go up, but they’d lose their health insurance bills. Trouble is, theory doesn’t much resemble reality: most people with health insurance are getting more of it paid for by their employers. Since it’s not part of their official compensation, it’s a part of their income which isn’t taxed, maybe a part which would put them in a higher marginal bracket as well.
Now, employers who provide health insurance would love it: they’d lose a huge business expense, and few, if any, of them would simply give it to their employees as a higher salary. I’d guess that a lot of corporations would give some of that expense back to the employees, but not all of it: the employers would take that as extra profit.
But, if we look at places like single-payer Japan, we’ll see that people who can afford it maintain private health insurance plans, because what the single-payer system actually pays for is crap coverage; that’s where the theory departs from reality.
$32 trillion over 10 years??? That’s a big, big number. I mean, that’s an average total expenditure of $3.2 trillion a year for 10 years!
How much do we spend on healthcare a year now in the US? $3.8 trillion. And rising.
Suddenly, Bernie’s plan doesn’t look so bad does it?
Did IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) mention the current spending on healthcare? And if not, why not? Wouldn’t that be a valuable comparison.
The US spends almost double per capita what every other advanced nation on earth spends on healthcare, with outcomes that are no better than France, Japan, Switzerland, Israel, Finland, Sweden etc.
And actually, a single payer system is no more socialism (actually, it’s less socialist) than having a public sponsored military where the “employees” all work for the government.
Single payer is merely government supported insurance.
Is Israel a socialist nation? Is Switzerland?
Ignorant, copy-cat conservatists like Teach use words like “socialist” and “fascist” like they use any other slur, as an insult devoid of meaning.
Socialism is just fascism with better PR.
(Speech of May 1, 1927.)
People always respond to how well certain socialist countries have done with health care.
Yes. There are actually a few countries that have a decent health care system.
1. They also have the army about the size of Rhode Islands National Guard.
2. Their workers work 30 hours per week and make set wages.
3. The people buy their groceries on a daily or semi daily basis because their is almost no stock in the stores.
4. If calamity were to break out these countries would literally starve to death in a month.
5. Taxes are high. Not overly high as some believe but high none the less when you compare that to what they are actually making.
6. The USA’s health care system currently is a 5 trillion dollar per year industry. Now if you cut that in half you get 2.5 trillion or roughly the cost of what they are calculating it would cost for bernies plan.
7. Cutting in half the health care payout of our health care system would cost millions of jobs. Literally. Insurance companies would be out of business. Dozens of major corporations would no longer exist.
8. Combine that with the overwhelming desire to destroy the coal industry. Decimate Oil and natural Gas and it becomes quite clear that as is always typical of the socialist left…….they have no idea how to pay for anything…..
They only have lofty ideals and goals that are populist but do not rest in reality based facts and figures.
Adopting single payer, adopting climate change, adopting the penalization of wall street and adopting the notion that the rich and MIDDLE CLASS are going to pay for all this is absurd.
But its popular because what does it do>? It gives free stuff, reduced work weeks and returns America to the era she occupied in the world in 1890. A nation of wannabes sitting on a pile of resources but unable to use their wealth because the workers were being exploited.
A bad thing right? Well now instead of the workers being exploited they propose to exploit the rich and those that work……the question becomes what happens when the rich are no longer rich, the middle class no longer are middle class and those paying the bills no longer have any source in which to pay the bills?
National Calamity and national collapse…..exactly what the communist left wants…….to remake America in the image of their hero…..Lenin, Marx and stalin.
It is actually happening much faster than even I anticipated and that is scary bad for America and the world.
Lenin, Marx, Stalin? Socialist countries? Communist left?
Do you think that working men and women should be rewarded for the labors? That makes you a Marxist.
Was Stalin a proponent of carbon cap and trade systems? Was single payer healthcare a pillar of Lenin’s philosophy?
Would you agree that private insurance is socialistic at its base? Groups of people put money into a pool and that money gets redistributed asymetrically to that pool based on individual need. Some people pay in and get back much less than they pay; others get back much more than they paid in!
Would you agree that the US military is the most socialist entity on Earth? From top to bottom it is controlled and paid for by the government and consumes nearly 1/3rd of our tax revenues, and makes no money for itself. The workers are all government employees with their wages and behaviors set by the government.
Like you, didn’t Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Khrushchev, Putin et al support strong government/ socialist military systems?
Wouldn’t a true capitalist turn the military over to the private sector?
Healthcare in the US unfairly redistributes wealth from the working classes to the wealthy. Every other advanced nation on earth has found a better way.
Increasing atmospheric CO2 is causing the Earth to warm rapidly.
Strawman much?
-the confused little guy who exaggerates often and is obsessed with trangenders and dicks and uses ‘strawman’ arguments
“Healthcare in the US unfairly redistributes wealth from the working classes to the wealthy. ”
Wrong as usual jeffery. But you do get points for being consistent. Consistently wrong.
Even Politfact, the left leaning “truth” checking site states that under Obamacare “higher income earners will pay an estimated $46 billion more in taxes.” Further, “The rest of the burden will skew toward the upper half of the income ladder.”
“Increasing atmospheric CO2 is causing the Earth to warm rapidly.”
And this is wrong also. You really should try to keep up.
And jeff, did you enjoy the instalanche the other day? Half the internet got to see how little you know.