"If somebody has no money and they're lying in the middle of the street and they're dying, I'm going to take care of that person," Trump said. When chief anchor George Stephanopoulos pressed the billionaire businessman to describe how he would accomplish that, Trump said he would "work something out."You don't see the glaring inconsistencies here?
"We're going to work with our hospitals," he said. "We're going to work with our doctors. We’ve got to do something. You can't have a – a small percentage of our economy, because they’re down and out, have absolutely no protection so they end up dying from, you know, what you could have a simple procedure or even a pill. You can't do that."
"We'll work something out," Trump went on. "That doesn’t mean single payer."
And any move in that direction would necessitate trillions of dollars in new taxes over the coming decade, just when CBO warns the deficit and debt will begin to surge again.
Trump has raised his idea of health insurance coverage for all in the past, although he appears to be talking about a far more complicated approach than simply extending Medicare-style coverage to everyone. During an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes last September, Trump said that Obamacare was "a disaster" – with excessive premiums and deductibles -- and that he would replace it with a program that would "take care of everybody."
"Everybody's got to be covered," he said. “This is an un-Republican thing for me to say because a lot of times they say, "No, no, the lower 25 percent that can’t afford private. But . . . I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not."
"And if this means I lose an election, that's fine, because, frankly, we have to take care of the people in our country. We can't let them die on the sidewalks of New York or the sidewalks of Iowa or anywhere else."
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll found that 58 percent of Americans support enactment of a national health plan in which all Americans would get their insurance through an expanded form of Medicare, although Democrats are far more enamored of that approach than Republicans are. The downside of that approach, of course, is that Medicare spending is growing out of control, according to a new Congressional Budget Office analysis.
As for how to finance his ambitious proposals, Trump said, "The government's going to pay for it. But we're going to save so much money on the other side. But for the most it’s going to be a private plan and people are going to be able to go out and negotiate great plans with lots of different competition with lots of competitors with great companies and they can have their doctors, they can have plans, they can have everything."
He is talking about pay shifting in hospitals. The way it worked before obamacare. How do you cover the millions of uninsured that will be having their policies canceled.
Now what is the Cruz plan? He is the one accusing Trump of being a communist.