The Patriot Post® · Medicare for All vs. Trump Transparency

Medicare for All. For a moment, the promise of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to socialize American medicine seemed too good to be true. But the truth is that this cornerstone of each of their campaigns may not even make it out of the Democrat primaries.

Marie Fishpaw and Jamie Hall explain why at The Daily Signal: “In fact, it turns out Medicare for All would cost some working families more than their budget for electricity; others, their gasoline budget; and others, even more than their food budget. As a result, 73.5% of Americans will have less money in their pockets under Medicare for All. The cost of the new taxes they have to pay will be more than what they save on health care costs.”

They add, “Households that receive employer-sponsored coverage would be particularly hard hit. Their income after taxes would shrink by an average of $10,554, and 87% of them would be financially worse off. Even lower-income working families, which currently receive health care through government programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, would be worse off. Their average household income after taxes would decline by $5,592 per year. That’s because fully paying for these programs requires taxes to go up — a lot.”

Of course, “higher taxes for everyone” is the one part of this ruinous plan that Democrat presidential candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren conveniently leave out. On the debate stage, it’s all about making Americans think they’re getting something for nothing. But that nothing is going to cost hard-working Americans tens of trillions of dollars.

Maybe that’s why Warren is now subtly backtracking from her original plan. (On a side note, Sanders isn’t walking away from his desire to end private healthcare plans, despite polling data that threatens to sink his struggling campaign.)

Warren “still supports a single-payer system that would outlaw most private health insurance and charge the federal government with financing virtually all of the nation’s health care,” writes Reason’s Peter Suderman. “But less than a month after releasing a half-baked plan to finance single-payer, the Massachusetts Democrat released yet another plan — an implementation timeline that calls for passing full-fledged Medicare for All in year three of her presidency. That is not a plan to pass Medicare for All; it is an acknowledgment that it will never happen.”

If it did happen, it would undermine the American economy and wreck the budgetary balance that allows many families to put food on the table and pay their other bills.

Even some on the Left are admitting that Warren’s utopian vision is unworkable. Just five days after she released her plan, The New York Times told its readership, “The federal government is projected to spend about $58 trillion over the next decade. Ms. Warren would need to persuade Congress to approve her plans, a difficult feat for any one of her expansive proposals, let alone her entire agenda. If she succeeded, she would increase federal spending by roughly 50 percent.”

There goes Medicare for All — which is bad news for Warren, but good news for the rest of us. And here’s more good news: The Trump administration is actually working on helping Americans to understand their medical choices and make them more affordable.

Just last week, in response to the president’s executive order, the Department of Health and Human Services announced two new rules that would “take historic steps to increase price transparency to empower patients and increase competition among all hospitals, group health plans and health insurance carriers in the individual and group markets.”

This announcement isn’t going to shake up the 2020 presidential campaign or win any praise from the Leftmedia, but it’s a necessary and important step to increase competition in the marketplace and save us from a socialist takeover of roughly one-fifth of the U.S. economy and a system that, for all its faults, is still the best in the world.

PowerLine’s John Hinderaker writes, “These health care rules illustrate why it is so vitally important that President Trump be re-elected in 2020. If he serves two terms, initiatives like these will be fully implemented and become part of consumers’ expectations, and the benefits of enhanced competition will become obvious.”

Hinderaker adds, “The Democrats don’t want our health care system to be improved. They want it to fail, so they can implement socialized medicine. Thus, if they win the presidency next year, they will be able to scuttle these and many other positive Trump administration initiatives. This is one of several reasons why the stakes in next year’s election are so high.”

There’s no stopping the Democrat field from making one outlandish promise after another. It’s what they do. But while they’re trying to hoodwink American voters into voting for a plan they themselves know we can’t afford, the Trump administration is actually trying to make our current healthcare system more transparent and affordable.