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But why would they trash one of their sacred cows?

WaPo notices that single-payer healthcare would be devastatingly expensive



The Washington Post Editorial Board begins its most recent healthcare screed with an outright falsehood.
OBAMACARE LOOKS shaky, mostly because Republicans are sabotaging it.
To be clear: Nothing has been sabotaged. ObamaCare was in freefall before Trump was elected, and Republicans have done very little since to alter its trajectory. ObamaCare is working exactly as it was supposed to, and it's collapsing because it was intended to collapse.

The government was going to run all aspects of your physical and mental health, giving them extraordinary control over every aspect of your day-to-day life

For a while, The Democrat plan worked flawlessly. They passed their disastrous law thanks to late night shenanigans and the "ignorance of the American voter." It began to implode just as it was supposed to, and Dems were in position to advance their next healthcare agenda. In true Scooby-Doo fashion, it would have worked too - they would have gotten away with it if it weren't for the worst candidate in U.S. political history. Hillary lost, and the President who was supposed to introduce the next phase of left-wing healthcare never materialized. The next phase, of course, was supposed to be single-payer. The government was going to run all aspects of your physical and mental health, giving them extraordinary control over every aspect of your day-to-day life. After all, there's not one thing you do that can't be tied - however tangentially - to the cost of medical care. But wait. What's this? The Washington Post has just discovered that Single Payer would be really, really, expensive! In fact, it would require massive, probably unsustainable, tax increases. Why, if only there had been someone - like every conservative on Earth - who could have told them this before!

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The single-payer model has some strong advantages. It is much simpler for most people — no more insurance forms or related hassles. Employers would no longer be mixed up in providing health-care benefits, and taxpayers would no longer subsidize that form of private compensation. Government experts could conduct research on treatments and use that information to directly cut costs across the system. But the government’s price tag would be astonishing. When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proposed a “Medicare for all” health plan in his presidential campaign, the nonpartisan Urban Institute figured that it would raise government spending by $32 trillion over 10 years, requiring a tax increase so huge that even the democratic socialist Mr. Sanders did not propose anything close to it. Single-payer advocates counter that government-run health systems in other developed countries spend much less than the United States does on its complex public-private arrangement. They say that if the United States adopted a European model, it could expand coverage to everyone by realizing a mountain of savings with no measureable decline in health outcomes, in part because excessive administrative costs and profit would be wrung from the system. In fact, the savings would be less dramatic; the Urban Institute’s projections are closer to reality. The public piece of the American health-care system has not proven itself to be particularly cost-efficient. On a per capita basis, U.S. government health programs alone spend more than Canada, Australia, France and Britain each do on their entire health systems. That means the U.S. government spends more per American to cover a slice of the population than other governments spend per citizen to cover all of theirs. Simply expanding Medicare to all would not automatically result in a radically more efficient health-care system. Something else would have to change.

Virtually every federally-run boondoggle ends up costing far more than projected, and healthcare would likely be no different

They're probably right that it would be simpler. I won't try to argue that point. But, that doesn't make it a good idea. Thanks to a little ting called reality, the country would end up spending, way, way, way, waaaaay, more than it saves. ...And all of it is going to have to come from tax increases. More importantly, since tax dollars are involved, the feds will probably look for the cheapest way to do everything, meaning that - just as it has with ObamaCare - the quality of care will suffer as the number of choices are diminished. By the way, that $32 trillion estimate is probably low. Virtually every federally-run boondoggle ends up costing far more than projected, and healthcare would likely be no different. 32 trillion is the rosiest of rosy scenarios. Even if it's correct, the United States is currently $20 trillion in debt. Why is anyone even discussing something that could add $32 trillion to that number? Honestly, the fact that the WaPo felt it was important to publish this piece makes me a bit nervous. Something about this has my spider-sense tingling. Donald Trump has been, at various times, a vocal single-payer proponent. The Washington Post - a newspaper that regularly tries to torpedo his goals - just ran a major editorial that trashes one of the left's sacred cows. This makes me wonder: Do they know something we don't? Is this an advance strike on Trump's ObamaCare fix? Remember, there's no principle they won't abandon if doing so means hurting the current President. Why run this piece now? Let's hope the White House isn't getting ready for some kind of pseudo-single-payer push...


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