Single-Payer Health Care Is The Goal For Both Democrats And Republicans
Both California and New York are moving rapidly toward legislating a state-run single-payer health care system. The plans would be costly – about $400 billion to cover every Californian, legal or not, and between $91 billion and $225 billion for New Yorkers. The plans would necessarily raise taxes substantially. Economists estimate a 15% rise in payroll taxes for the Golden State.
Reason.com reports that “Vermont experimented with single-payer health care, but ultimately abandoned the project in 2014 because it was too costly.” State-run single-payer health care is unsustainable, but the Republican Party, under the encouragement of President Trump, is working to facilitate a fix. Newsweek reports:
An Economist/YouGov survey shows 46 percent of the party in favor of expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American. Just 38 percent are opposed.
According to The New Republican,
“By allowing health-insurance companies to discriminate based on a pre-existing condition, the GOP would break the market for this subset of people. And then they would use government funds to fix this market failure. But they would funnel it directly to health-insurance companies, rather than eliminating the middleman.
This is single-payer for dummies. In a single-payer system, the government picks up the health-care costs for the population, paid for through progressive taxation.”
The GOP conspired to create their version of Obamacare, slapping a new, improved name on it: American Health Care Act. Instead of making good on campaign promises to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they made their true intentions abundantly clear. American syndicated columnist, author, political commentator, and psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer predicted that:
Trump and Republican leaders may be celebrating the bill getting passed, but he believes the U.S. is now headed for a single-payer health care system. Krauthammer said ObamaCare “failed at every level,” but it did change Americans’ expectations regarding health care.
“I would predict that in less than seven years, we’ll be in a single-payer system,” Krauthammer said, pointing out that Republicans aren’t even arguing for a free market system anymore.
Candidate Trump deceived his supporters by leading them in chants of “Repeal and Replace”, but his own declarations betray an ideological commitment that would vindicate every Bernie Sanders supporter.
More recently, President Trump reiterated his priority:
I suggest that we add more dollars to Healthcare and make it the best anywhere. ObamaCare is dead – the Republicans will do much better!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 28, 2017
The biggest campaign issue of 2016 was Obamacare. Democrats wanted to make it bigger. Republicans vowed to repeal it and replace it with free market solutions. Now that Trump is elected and the Republicans have the majority in both houses of Congress, they’ve co-opted this huge power grab for their own benefit. Politicians and pundits will employ euphemisms for Socialized Medicine, but, as the World Socialist Web Site declares:
The current debate in Congress and the media raises the urgent need for a socialist policy of universal health care to meet the needs of the entire population, not just those wealthy few at the top who dominate American society. Obamacare has proven that there is no longer any progressive reform possible within the framework of the American capitalist system.