Source: Liberato, By Christopher Wright, March 19, 2021
DAILY SKIRMISH REPORT: Joe Biden is busy expanding Obamacare, but single payer has not gone away. The Left has been salivating for socialized medicine for a hundred years, and they’re not about to quit now. Far from it.
House Democrats just reintroduced their Medicare for All bill, with 109 co-sponsors. Physicians for a National Health Program, a group with communist roots, endorses the legislation. If you think communism is cute, we’ll start that conversation with the 100 million corpses communism has piled up in the last hundred years and go from there, OK?
Xavier Becerra, a long-time supporter of single payer, was just confirmed as Health and Human Services Secretary.
The Rhode Island Senate adopted a resolution calling on Congress to create a single payer healthcare system.
A Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin announced support for Medicare for All and declined to say whether he wants to eliminate all private insurance.
An Illinois House committee voted up a single payer plan for the state.
A single payer bill has been proposed again in the California Assembly. A 2017 bill failed when people realized it would cost twice the state’s budget.
Activists in Washington state are lobbying their city council to support single payer legislation for the state.
As you can see, there’s still a lot of activity on single payer. In Florida, the activity is going the other way. A proposal to require a two-third’s supermajority of both houses and a ballot referendum before adopting single payer is advancing in the state legislature.
What’s wrong with single payer, you ask? Let’s do something the Left never does and talk about the problems their proposals would cause. Here are just some of the problems from recent stories. Single payer involves price controls, meaning the government will set prices for all healthcare services. History shows price controls lead to shortages in healthcare and unacceptably long wait times, among other problems. New York’s single payer bill would triple state taxes, and cause residents to flee to lower-tax jurisdictions. It’s often said that single payer will eliminate inequality in healthcare. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The rich will always find a way to get the healthcare they want and everybody else will get substandard treatment.
Here’s how single payer works in the real world. VA doctors harvested liver tissue from veterans without their consent, putting them at serious risk, a watchdog agency said. The Veterans Administration runs a single payer health system for the nation’s military veterans. Active duty troops are also finding out single payer isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. $900 million in malpractice claims against military hospitals have racked up since Congress allowed them a year ago, and lawmakers are angry the Pentagon is taking so long to pay.
That’s just a taste of the problems I’ve seen in years of reading about single payer. It’s time to drop the pom-poms, stop the cheerleading, and get real. The next time you run into a single payer fanatic, ask them to explain how they will deal with the problems their proposal will create. Watch them ignore the question, give you some flim-flam, or attack you for asking it. The one thing they won’t do, I’m sure, is give you satisfactory answers – because they can’t.
