The price of BernieCare
The price of BernieCare
Chuck Schumer said this week that medical care is the issue that will define the November elections, and that the minority leader in the Senate may be right for the wrong reason. Democrats may end up paying a high political price for subscribing en masse to Bernie Sanders' health care agenda.
Republicans are running ads that criticize Democrats about single-payer health care, and President Trump framed the issue this week in a USA Today opinion piece that said: Unfair because not all candidates have endorsed a single payer, but if now they want to repudiate him they should say it.
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Trump refers to Bernie Sanders' bill known as Medicare for All, which has been endorsed by 16 senators, including almost all the leading candidates for the presidency of the left in 2020 (Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren ).
A bill by the House of Representatives has attracted more than 120 co-sponsors, which is almost two-thirds of the current Democratic group. Other devotees include the Democratic nominees for Governor in California (Gavin Newsom) and Florida (Andrew Gillum) and dozens of other candidates across the country. Did the Democrats think they could back this up to please their progressive base but then they did not notice it?
Medicare for all would finance health care through taxes instead of insurance premiums, deductibles and copayments. All care would then be "free" in the Venezuelan sense of the word. The government would drastically reduce the reimbursement rates doctors receive for providing services. All this would reduce administrative costs and make medical care more efficient, or so we are told. And we're not supposed to call this "government-managed medical care," although who do you think would make the payment decisions?
Mr. Trump noted in his opinion article that the plan would cost the federal government $ 32.6 billion in 10 years. That figure comes from an analysis conducted by Charles Blahous of the Mercatus Center, a respected researcher and former administrator of Social Security and Medicare who sometimes writes for us. His findings are at the stage of all serious analysis.
This expenditure figure amounts to 10.7% of GDP in 2022 when the plan starts and then rises from there. National defense, routinely ridiculed for being too expensive and wasteful, is only 3% of GDP today. And be prepared: "Doubling all currently projected federal and individual income tax revenues would be insufficient to fund the additional federal costs of the plan," says Mr. Blahous.
Liberals are convinced that these estimates overlook what would be a decline in overall health spending, but Mr. Blahous strays from his path toward credit savings that would probably be illusory, such as lower drug costs. As in all socialist systems, real "savings" would come from price controls and waiting lists for many health care services. To have a cold? Enters. Hip replacement or breast reconstruction? Get online
And that is the good news. The truth is that BernieCare would essentially destroy the entire health system today. The Sanders project would eliminate employer-sponsored insurance, which now covers some 150 million Americans. The selling point for that should be: If you like your health care plan, we will not let you keep it.
BernieCare would also make Medicare explode as we know it by creating a new health system that young and old should join. We do not like to see Republicans who defend current Medicare as a perfect system, as it has many shortcomings and needs reform as the premium support that Paul Ryan has proposed. But compared to BernieCare, Medicare is the Mayo Clinic for everyone.
Maybe the Democrats should have looked at the results in Vermont when Bernie's home state tried to establish a single payer. A Democratic governor abandoned the idea in 2014 once he was considering a payroll tax of 11.5%, plus an income tax of 9.5% and more increases to come. The progressives could not even put into operation a single payer for some 625,000 people in a state with a decent health profile. In 2016, almost 80% of voters rejected a referendum to establish a single payer in Colorado.
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Distortion charges for Democrats are especially rich given that they have spent tens of millions of advertising dollars this year accusing Republicans of wanting to deny chemotherapy to cancer patients who do not have insurance. The truth is that last year, the Republican Party debated more rational ways to cover people with pre-existing conditions other than the mandates that increase the cost of premiums for everyone at ObamaCare. GOP ideas that would cover pre-existing conditions include high-risk groups that directly subsidize difficult-to-insure patients.
Republicans are inept at defending themselves, and their inability to repeal ObamaCare has made them vulnerable to attack. But by dissecting the single payer, the Republican Party is providing voters with crucial information about what Democrats want to do in health when they take power next time. ObamaCare was simply a down payment on BernieCare.
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SOURCE LINK ERESVIRAL.COM https://www.beviral.online
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