Posted on 11/12/2018 7:19:42 AM PST by Kaslin
The 2018 midterms could someday be remembered as the beginning of the Democratic Party’s full embrace of creating a single-payer health care system in the United States. For the first time in American history, a large number of Democrats, many of whom identify as socialists, openly campaigned for the creation of a government-run health insurance model.
For instance, Democratic Socialists of America member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won 78 percent of the vote on Election Day, championed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) “Medicare for All” proposal, calling it the “ethical, logical, and affordable path to ensuring no person goes without dignified healthcare.” According to Ocasio-Cortez, “Medicare for All will reduce the existing costs of healthcare (and make Medicare cheaper, too!) by allowing all people in the US to buy into a universal healthcare system.”
Ocasio-Cortez says she supports a universal system that would include “full vision, dental, and mental healthcare - because we know that true healthcare is about the whole self, not just your yearly physical.”
The cost of enacting such a radical program would be astronomical. Researchers at the Mercatus Center say Sen. Sanders’ plan would cost $32.6 trillion in its first decade, and they note that even if Congress were to double taxes paid by individuals and corporations, it wouldn’t be enough to pay for the program. That should terrify you, especially since the U.S. government’s deficit for the 2018 fiscal year was $782 billion and the national debt now stands at a $21.7 trillion.
But as shocking as the price tag for single-payer health care would be, it pales in comparison to the numerous health care-related problems that would be created by such a model. For starters, the government has an absolutely terrible record of providing health care. One example is the Veterans Health Administration, which is run by the federal government. It routinely suffers from underfunding and long wait times, which has forced the agency to allow veterans to go elsewhere to receive care. As the Military Times notes, “About one-third of all VA medical appointments today are … conducted by physicians outside the department’s system.”
The Washington Examiner reported in 2017, “VA documents also show there are currently 184,520 veterans across the nation waiting longer than 30 days for an appointment and more than 45,000 new veteran patients waiting more than 90 days. Internal VA documents also indicate 479,239 veterans nationwide are waiting for physician requested follow-up appointments over 30 days for the period July to September 2017.”
Many doctors, especially highly skilled specialists, refuse to take on patients with Medicaid coverage because of Medicaid’s low reimbursement rates. An important 2011 study found doctors are 35 percent less likely to accept a new patient enrolled in Medicaid than they are to accept a patient with private health insurance.
If the federal government can’t properly run the VA system or Medicaid—or even the Post Office—why does anyone think it could manage one of the largest industries in the United States today?
Even more troublin g is the danger posed to individual liberty by a single-payer health care system. In a world in which the government pays your health care bills, it has an incentive to reward and punish behavior. Why not tax overweight Americans more money under a single-payer scheme? Don’t they cost the system more? Why not force Americans to quit smoking tobacco or drinking alcohol? Aren’t those activities associated with numerous health dangers?
ingle-payer systems are also notorious for rationing care. In October, the Telegraph (U.K.) noted, “A report by Fertility Fairness reveals that local commissioners are imposing ‘arbitrary’ criteria such as male body mass index (BMI), as well as age, as a means of restricting access to IVF,” which is used to help couples struggling to have children.
In other words, the masterminds in England have determined some men are just too fat to have children.
This story comes on the heels of reports indicating the English National Health Service’s forthcoming 10-year plan will make group appointments with primary care doctors—which could include as many as 15 patients—the “default” option for patients with long-term health problems.
For these and countless other reasons, conservatives and other supporters of individual liberty need to begin mobilizing against some left-wing Democrats’ plan to introduce a single-payer system in the United States. If Democrats manage to gain even more power in 2020, they will almost certainly attempt to enact a single-payer plan similar to Sen. Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal. To save our republic (and lives), we must stop them.
Think...under this system, you’d have a 14-month waiting period for prenatal care (30 days for illegal alien mothers to facilitate birthright citizenship), but killing the baby is free, convenient, available every day of the year. If you decide to go the free pro-life charity care center, then you cannot do that either because it’ll be outlawed. The rich (or really the poor) can learn Spanish, go to Mexico, pay for doctors, and get real health care, but their babies, born outside the United States, would lack birthright citizenship. But only after paying 90% of their money to the government in taxes.
Ah, the yearning desire of the American people fulfilled at last. And I’m unfortunately not joking nor even exaggerating. This is what a large majority of millennial young adult voters, fully indoctrinated in atheistic communism in everything but name and mostly (yes, a majority) lacking parents (plural) who don’t abandon their children, want, even in the “red” states.
Older Americans never experienced the trauma and deep poverty of juveniles today. Sure, they can use better technology, and many posses unsurpassed material wealth. But they have no father, increasingly know not of God as Father, and so take government as their father. They know not the power of God, so they worship government as a god. Our colleges and universities and their graduates, who now teach in public schools all across this land, inculcate this barren spirituality into the youngest generation of Americans. Public schools will not teach religion, but they can teach insidiously if never explicitly materialism, sentimentalism, scientism, and various other antithesitic heresies as a veritable new religion that displaces effectively the adoration of the one True God. Our schools fail to inculcate basic logical reasoning into the youngest generation of Americans, primarily because such logic defeats plainly liberalism and all these false philosophies, and worse still for Satan, logic leads people to the Logos, God Incarnate, the Way, the Truth, the Life, Jesus Christ, who formed us in His Image.
Americans, especially young Americans, desperately long for God, whom they know not, and therefore fall into the trap of accepting big government as the false god of their lives, according the bureaucracy and the Democrats who sustain it the adulation that theistic societies reserve for God.
Other than evangelization, bringing people to God, getting these young adults into the Church, changing their materialistic worldview into a theocentric one, I can offer no practical solution.
So, rather than offer such insurance, the private companies that are still around just stopped offering health insurance? Because my broker, when I asked about private health insurance for my husband, told me that he should hang on for dear life to the insurance his company offers. And when I called USAA to inquire, they said they only have Marketplace and ONE private insurer. And the term is only for 3 months at a time.
I say we just burn the damn place down and start over... :(
Well said.
Yes, for the simple reason that insurance is a numbers game, and if the policy underwriters are unsure of the numbers, they don't play.
The big wildcard in Obamacare's mandatory minimum coverage was for pre-existing conditions. They had no idea how many pre-existing conditions they would suddenly be liable to pay out for, so they could not accurately price their product. So they didn't offer a product.
Bravo..!
Theoretically that would be a wash, as so many people have pre-existing conditions that as one moves from Company A to Company B, and the other vice-versa, they would offset.
In practice though insurers always try and cherry-pick the healthiest customers who are pure profit. We started the house of cards tumbling when we shoved all of the older customers they didn’t want onto Medicare. It’s just going to keep coming down at this point.
1) Continues to allow private "concierge" medicine,
2) Eliminates trial lawyer profiteering from malpractice suits.
3) Punishes hypochondriacs and high-risk lifestyle practitioners by restricting their access to the system.
Part 3 will be the hardest part for Democrats to swallow, since so many of their most active base supporters fall into that category. But the public would strongly support such a system - and the party who delivered it.
You ignore all of the people that had NO previous coverage, who suddenly could get coverage and have their pre-existing conditions covered. The cost of those new policyholders was the wildcard that nobody could reliably estimate, or hedge against. So the two choices is to radically raise premiums or not offer coverage at all.
They now control the state, with our homosexual Governor elect and control of both the State Senate and House, Sec. State, and AG.....
We're toast!
Socialists Won’t Rest Until We Have Single-Payer Health Care
And you imagine they will stop there sort of absolute power? hahahaha
Post of the day.
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