The Patriot Post® · Demo 2020 Frontrunner Vows to Destroy Private Health Care

Socialized medicine has long been the Holy Grail for American progressives. And why not? With nationalized health care, the state literally holds the power of life and death over its citizens, making them much easier to control.

Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders made socialized health care integral to his 2016 Democrat presidential primary campaign, and other Democrats — already having favored quasi-socialist ObamaCare — are going all in for the latest version, marketed under the name “Medicare For All” banner.

In 2013, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid eagerly admitted single-payer (read “government-run”) health care was the ultimate goal, with ObamaCare just a step along that path. Of course, Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats knew they could not openly admit that back in 2008, so they blatantly and repeatedly lied. Or, as MIT professor and ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber admitted candidly at a 2014 health economics conference, “This bill was written in a tortured way. … Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. … Call it the ‘stupidity of the American voter’ or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

Obama knew he was a liar when he repeatedly claimed, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”; a lie so egregious that PolitiFact awarded Obama with its “Lie of the Year” in 2013. Yet few Americans realize that the disastrous results ObamaCare produced — the bankrupted CO-OPs, the millions of Americans kicked off private insurance, the skyrocketing costs — were designed to make Americans so frustrated and angry with those greedy insurance companies that they would clamor for government-run health care.

And now Democrats, more radical than ever, are pushing socialized health care once again — albeit with some feigned resistance among the ranks to at least make it appear there’s thoughtful debate.

At a town hall meeting Monday night, Sen. Kamala Harris, current frontrunner for the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination, was unapologetic in calling for socialized health care. After endorsing Medicare for All, she was asked if Americans who liked their current insurance could keep it. She replied unequivocally that private insurance would be outlawed, stating, “Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care. And you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require. … Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.”

The private health care of 150 million Americans? Gone.

Moreover, hers was a lie so gargantuan as to make Obama proud.

Medicare has mountains of paperwork, as well as an approval process run by government bureaucrats. Saying so isn’t a “conservative attack,” as leftists claim; those fact come directly from the Medicare website. So with Medicare for All, when your life is on the line, you get the efficiency of the DMV, the competence of the Postal Service, and the compassion of the IRS.

And an astronomical price tag, which George Mason University’s Mercatus Center estimates at a mind-boggling $32.6 trillion over 10 years, nearly doubling the cost of all government. Harris and other proponents claim the doubling of taxes will be offset by eliminating premiums, reducing administrative inefficiencies (because we all know government is the gold standard of efficiency), and cutting drug costs, but these are more blatant lies. ObamaCare was passed promising costs under $900 billion over the following decade, but costs had doubled just three years after passage of the law, despite not being fully implemented.

We don’t even have to guess if this would work. The leftist utopias of Vermont and California both tried to implement single-payer, government-run health care, and both quickly abandoned the quixotic venture after costs spiraled out of control.

And what of results? We already have two government-run health care programs — the Veterans Administration and Indian Health Services — and both are national embarrassments. Five years ago the scandal broke in which we learned VA employees were falsifying appointment records to make it appear wait times were less than 14 days, when in actuality tens of thousands of veterans waited months, or even years, for treatment, with many dying while waiting.

Today this disaster is still not fixed, and has in fact gotten worse. What possible leap of logic would lead us to believe a government-run health care system that leaves hundreds of thousands of veterans without care will suddenly, miraculously be able to provide excellent care to hundreds of millions of Americans?

Leftmedia propagandists are eager collaborators in the “progressive” plan, recently touting polls showing a majority of Americans (56%) favor Medicare for All. That is true … sort of.

Americans support Medicare for All when told it would guarantee health insurance as a right (71%) and eliminate premiums (67%). But that support plummets when people are informed that the government-run system would lead to delays in getting care (26%) and higher taxes (37%), or that it would eliminate private insurance (37%) and the current Medicare program (32%).

Thousands more doctors each year are refusing to take Medicare patients because of shrinking reimbursements and the bureaucratic nightmare of fighting to get paid. It is delusional to think Medicare for All would improve the situation. In Canada and Great Britain, which have nationalized or regionalized health care, primary care is adequate, but seeing a specialist takes months.

Medicare for All would be an unmitigated disaster, and the American people overwhelmingly reject it when given the facts. Now Americans need to reject those who keep trying to repackage it and sneak it past us.