The un-American abomination that is single-payer health care, the goal of progressives and other subversives for a century, is rearing its ugly head again in wake of the Republicans’ pathetic failure to deliver on their promise to repeal the national embarrassment that is Obamacare.
Democrats smell blood in the water after Republicans betrayed their supporters by not driving a stake through the heart of the wealth-transferring Obamacare law that is fundamentally changing America by reducing the quality of health care delivery and making Americans poorer.
Hyper-expensive, bureaucratic, actuarially unsound government program known as Medicare
Single-payer has never been about health. It is about one thing: control. It is the ultimate betrayal of the American Revolution. It is the triumph of tyranny over the ordered liberty of the American experiment in self-governance. It nullifies America’s unofficial national mission statement – “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” – that is embedded in the Declaration of Independence. It makes America unexceptional; just another big-government country at the United Nations.
The push comes as Obamacare wreaks havoc on consumers, insurers, and providers. The Obamacare exchanges are collapsing, insurers are pulling out of markets across the country, insurance policy premiums and deductibles are ridiculously unaffordable, and are certain to grow even more expensive.
It also comes as trend-setting California backs away from plans for a state-level single payer program because it would be larger than the entire state budget.
The leader of this effort is media heartthrob Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a self-described socialist who is more of a communist, a man who once claimed cervical cancer was caused by women not experiencing enough #. This economic ignoramus views an abundance of consumer choice as an obstacle to utopia. “You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country,” he said on the campaign trail.
Sanders wants the hyper-expensive, bureaucratic, actuarially unsound government program known as Medicare to expand to cover everyone in the United States.
"Instead of wasting hundreds of billions of dollars trying to administer an enormously complicated system of hundreds of separate insurance plans, there would be one insurance plan for the American people with one single payer,” Sanders said yesterday.
No doubt Sanders’ easy-to-understand message is resonating with plenty of low-information voters
That socialists have been able to make the argument that government health care is more efficient than market forces without experiencing the widespread ridicule hurled at the Clintons when they pushed for “HillaryCare,” is a testament to the lousy messaging skills of Republicans.
This brings to mind something said by a friend of mine, the late Mike Flynn, founding editor of Breitbart’s Big Government website and one-time congressional candidate in Illinois. He told me years ago, as Obamacare got closer to passage, that it would pass and that “I can’t believe they’re arguing for it on efficiency grounds.”
No doubt Sanders’ easy-to-understand message is resonating with plenty of low-information voters. He doesn’t need to convince journalists – they’ve been onboard for decades. Sanders said 16 Democrat senators support his proposal, including Kamala Harris (Calif.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), and Cory Booker (N.J.).
Democrat candidates are sure to follow Sanders’ radical example in the midterm elections next year and in 2020. According to the New York Times, support for single-payer is at a high-water mark in Congress, at least among Democrats. "About 60 percent of House Democrats have endorsed a 'Medicare for all' bill introduced by Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan," the media outlet reports.
Republicans feebly responded by offering their own plan.
Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Bill Cassidy (La.), Dean Heller (Nev.), and Ron Johnson (Wisc.) are backing a proposal likely to go nowhere that would divert Obamacare funds to states as block grants. But the measure wouldn’t repeal Obamacare, which has been a signature promise of Republicans ever since the redistributionist law was enacted in 2010.
Support Canada Free Press
The system is built on lies. It is a Trojan horse for a total government takeover of health care in the United States
Meanwhile, the so-called Affordable Care Act that Graham is trying to prop up, is falling apart, exactly as it was designed to do. This diabolical program that emerged from the minds of Saul Alinsky adherents, guarantees total government control over health care eventually. Insurers, who are only too eager to sell the rope today that will be used to hang them tomorrow, may get rich in the short term but bankrupted longer-term.
The system is built on lies. It is a Trojan horse for a total government takeover of health care in the United States.
This isn’t some farfetched theory from Fringeville.
Obamacare was enacted only because of a "lack of transparency" in the lawmaking process and the "stupidity of the American voter," Jonathan Gruber, who helped design the program, infamously said in 2014. The law was "written in a tortured way" to fool lawmakers and their constituents, he said.
"If you had a law that made it explicit that healthy people are going to pay in and sick people are going to get subsidies, it would not have passed," Gruber added.
Yale University political science professor Jacob Hacker, known as the “father of the public option” admitted at a Tides Foundation event in 2008 that Obamacare would lead to a single-payer health care system.
Left-wingers believe government is the solution to the nation’s problems. They don’t trust markets and insist on controlling them, with disastrous results
Hacker said:
Someone once said to me, ‘Well, this is a Trojan horse for single payer.’ Well, it’s not a Trojan horse, right? It’s just right there! I’m telling you, we’re going to get there over time, slowly, but we’ll move away from reliance on employment based health insurance as we should. But we’re going to do it in a way that we’re not going to frighten people into thinking that they’re going to lose their private insurance.
Former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), and a cohort of left-wing politicos have boasted that Obamacare was designed to fail in order to clear the way for a single-payer system. Unsuccessful Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton even prayed for Obamacare to fail.
How can so many people be so obtuse?
Left-wingers believe government is the solution to the nation’s problems. They don’t trust markets and insist on controlling them, with disastrous results, as history has shown over and over again.
A 2014 New Republic article by Noam Scheiber sums up the progressive view of health care delivery.
“For-profit health insurance is on some level morally offensive—at least when it’s practiced the way we Americans practice capitalism,” he wrote.
Markets actually work well, especially the way capitalism is practiced in the United States. The problem arises when holier-than-thou types come along and declare a basic product or service like health care a fundamental human right, as Obama and other socialists have done for decades. Then government gets involved, red tape explodes like a mushroom cloud, those who provide the product or service have targets painted on their back, and everything gets screwed up. We all suffer.
If the U.S. falls under a health care Iron Curtain, there won’t be anywhere to go
The textbook communist approach to a total takeover of health care is harsh. Nationalizing hospitals, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, and placing slave collars around the necks of physicians and medical support staff is rough stuff.
Obamacare operates on more of a corporatist, i.e. fascist, model, which makes it easier for people to accept. Don’t nationalize anything outright. Take over the system by bribing people and putting them on the payroll. Let the owners of the means of production keep their property but take away their control over it. Many people won’t protest at all and politicians will still have the option of nationalizing the health care system outright later when it won’t be as painful for people. Like the proverbial frog that gets boiled in a pot of water because it doesn’t notice the gradual increase in heat, people won’t even notice their freedom disappearing.
Commie agitprop director Michael Moore would prefer the kind of Medicare-for-all style single-payer system advocated by Sen. Sanders. Three years ago when Moore called Obamacare “awful,” the New Republic’s Scheiber acknowledged his complaints about the Affordable Care Act but wrote that total government control will still be the end result, so don’t worry about it.
Obamacare is "a deceptively sneaky way to get the health care system both of us really want," Scheiber wrote.
Now that the Left is on the single-payer warpath again, the media environment will begin to resemble what it was when Democrats were pushing Obamacare in 2009 and 2010. Strap yourself in for high-pressure emotional blackmail from social justice warriors like an op-ed by physician David A. Ansell of the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago in yesterday’s Washington Post.
In his tear-jerker of an essay, Ansell writes that when a patient of his died, "[h]er death certificate named liver disease as her cause of death, but that’s not true. The real cause was inequality. If the United States had a Medicare-for-all health insurance system, she might have been saved."
This is the way socialists and communists look at the world. They deny reality. They deny human nature. Mankind can’t be left as it is; it must be changed. Human differences aren’t natural first and foremost; they are political and subject to correction by political means.
Ansell’s patient had a bad liver and for whatever reason, she died. That’s sad. Would a command-and-control DMV-style health care system with Soviet-style queues stretching around the block have saved her life? Who knows. But we do know that with the single-payer system we already have, that is, the one provided by the scandal-plagued Veterans Health Administration, patients die every day of neglect, having waited out their last days on lists, ignored and in agony. Government control kills.
When the government controls every aspect of health care, interest-group warfare runs wild. If you belong to a group with a trendy disease like HIV/AIDS, you get showered in research dollars and care. Get something a little more obscure that isn’t a vote-getter, and you die. Under single-payer, you can’t go elsewhere in the country, because single-payer is total. Single-payer systems, like the one in Canada, send patients to the U.S. for treatment all the time because the required care can’t be provided in that country. Single-payer doesn’t triage well, either. Britain’s penny-pinching yet monstrously expensive single-payer system routinely denies relatively basic care and allows Britons to go blind and deaf.
Sure, there may be some poor, sick people who don’t fare well under a market-based system, but they have a better chance of surviving and thriving when economic freedom rules and the production of wealth is maximized. The generosity of the American people – and of conservatives more than liberals, as studies have shown – is nearly boundless. There are always Cajun Navies ready to sail when Americans are in trouble, and there always have been. Poor, sick Americans don’t die in the streets, as leftist propaganda inspired by Charles Dickens novels, maintains.
If the U.S. falls under a health care Iron Curtain, there won’t be anywhere to go, unless maybe you’re rich and can travel to the various, isolated pockets of health care excellence around the world that haven’t succumbed to statist strangulation.
That is no solution.
