Health care choice
"So, if you like your health care you can't keep it?"
That was the question that Jake Tapper put to Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), and candidate for president, on her plan to provide Medicare for all. She is partly honest on this. She does want to eliminate private plans, including the plan you get from your employer. It may be good, it may suck, but it doesn't matter, it is gone.
Pretty much every candidate for the Democrat nomination for 2020 has signed on to some form of Medicare for All. Good, we need to have that discussion. Now for some facts.
It would cost $32 Trillion over the next 10 years. As a comparison, the federal budget just recently topped $4 Trillion a year..
Now, I demand honesty from the progressives in how this is going to be funded, and how it is to be rationed (yes it will be), and so you should expect no less from me.
By eliminating insurance, the administrative pipeline is streamlined significantly.
By eliminating payment by individuals for premiums, deductibles, co-pays and so on, that frees up the money in family budgets. Businesses will see their labor costs cut from this.
Obviously taxes such as medicare tax (3% currently split between employer and employee) rolls into that funding. Likely this tax spikes for both employer and employee to fund the program.
Remember that demand for honesty? Here it comes.
In the nations that are used as models, the burden for the welfare state is carried by everyone. It is impossible for it to be carried by the rich! That is the lie of the likes of Sanders, Harris, etc. They claim that Medicare for All would be FREE! to the majority of people. If you are in the middle class, you can count on up to 60% being taken out just for the welfare state. If you have an income of $40,000 a year, at least 40% will be withheld just for FREE!. Income taxes in these nations are far more regressive than progressive.
And as a point of reference to the $32 Trillion projected cost above, when Medicare began in 1965, the forecast cost in 1990 was $12 Billion. Actual cost in 1990 $90 Billion When you say, "well inflation" no, adjusting for inflation, the program should have spent $48 billion in 1990, around half, still. Oops.
40% or more. How is that FREE! working out for you?
With Universal coverage, and elimination of private care, what are we left with? Rationed care. Period. Any good or service has a scarcity based on a variety of conditions. If you don't qualify, what options are there?
Will innovation in medicine be impacted? With the above mentioned program, doctors will be given fixed schedules of fees. Researchers the same. How many doctors and researchers hang around for those wages? Senator Warren has proposed nationalizing big pharma. How many new products will come out of that monstrosity? No incentive to be creative, to excel.
What happens when we have insufficient providers for universal coverage? More rationing.
Some say we have a hybrid free market/government subsidized and regulated combo. It isn't a hybrid, it is Frankenstein. It is the worst of both. We need to make a decision, and hash this out as a nation. What we have doesn't work for too many people.
Please note that I intentionally did not describe attributes of a true free market system. There is no way to know what that would be like, with people free to practice medicine without license, where pharma took liability for its products without having to shoulder the regulatory process that is the FDA. People are terrified of things like that but then again, pioneers crossing the prairies to a place none in the company had been was pretty scary too.
Which way do we go? Our health depends on it.
That was the question that Jake Tapper put to Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), and candidate for president, on her plan to provide Medicare for all. She is partly honest on this. She does want to eliminate private plans, including the plan you get from your employer. It may be good, it may suck, but it doesn't matter, it is gone.
Pretty much every candidate for the Democrat nomination for 2020 has signed on to some form of Medicare for All. Good, we need to have that discussion. Now for some facts.
It would cost $32 Trillion over the next 10 years. As a comparison, the federal budget just recently topped $4 Trillion a year..
Now, I demand honesty from the progressives in how this is going to be funded, and how it is to be rationed (yes it will be), and so you should expect no less from me.
By eliminating insurance, the administrative pipeline is streamlined significantly.
By eliminating payment by individuals for premiums, deductibles, co-pays and so on, that frees up the money in family budgets. Businesses will see their labor costs cut from this.
Obviously taxes such as medicare tax (3% currently split between employer and employee) rolls into that funding. Likely this tax spikes for both employer and employee to fund the program.
Remember that demand for honesty? Here it comes.
In the nations that are used as models, the burden for the welfare state is carried by everyone. It is impossible for it to be carried by the rich! That is the lie of the likes of Sanders, Harris, etc. They claim that Medicare for All would be FREE! to the majority of people. If you are in the middle class, you can count on up to 60% being taken out just for the welfare state. If you have an income of $40,000 a year, at least 40% will be withheld just for FREE!. Income taxes in these nations are far more regressive than progressive.
And as a point of reference to the $32 Trillion projected cost above, when Medicare began in 1965, the forecast cost in 1990 was $12 Billion. Actual cost in 1990 $90 Billion When you say, "well inflation" no, adjusting for inflation, the program should have spent $48 billion in 1990, around half, still. Oops.
40% or more. How is that FREE! working out for you?
With Universal coverage, and elimination of private care, what are we left with? Rationed care. Period. Any good or service has a scarcity based on a variety of conditions. If you don't qualify, what options are there?
Will innovation in medicine be impacted? With the above mentioned program, doctors will be given fixed schedules of fees. Researchers the same. How many doctors and researchers hang around for those wages? Senator Warren has proposed nationalizing big pharma. How many new products will come out of that monstrosity? No incentive to be creative, to excel.
What happens when we have insufficient providers for universal coverage? More rationing.
Some say we have a hybrid free market/government subsidized and regulated combo. It isn't a hybrid, it is Frankenstein. It is the worst of both. We need to make a decision, and hash this out as a nation. What we have doesn't work for too many people.
Please note that I intentionally did not describe attributes of a true free market system. There is no way to know what that would be like, with people free to practice medicine without license, where pharma took liability for its products without having to shoulder the regulatory process that is the FDA. People are terrified of things like that but then again, pioneers crossing the prairies to a place none in the company had been was pretty scary too.
Which way do we go? Our health depends on it.
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