If you like your failed government-run health care system, you can keep it. Nancy Pelosi promised as much - and to double down w/ a $32 trillion new takeover scheme - last weekend in Milwaukee. #wiright #wipolitics Click To Tweet
July 25, 2018
Perspective By M.D. Kittle
If you like your failed government-run health care system, you can keep it.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) promised as much last weekend while campaigning in Milwaukee for fellow progressives.
Standing in solidarity with the increasingly socialist wing of her party, Pelosi went a step further, pitching the possibility of full government control of health care through a Bernie Sanders-style “Medicare For All” initiative.
A vote for Democrats, Pelosi said, is a vote for Obamacare, which turned out to be a financial nightmare for millions of Americans.
“Our goal has always been to expand coverage and to do so in a way that improves benefits … and we have to address the affordability issue that is so undermined by Republicans,” Pelosi said at a campaign stop Saturday for U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee), as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Pelosi was scheduled to make the case for affordable health care and why the Democratic Party is the “For the People” at a fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Tickets reportedly started out at $2,500, climbing as high as $33,900 for “Speaker’s Cabinet” level supporters.
The House minority leader and her progressive colleagues have long blamed Republicans for the death spiral that is the Democrat-led Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. But even the Commonwealth Fund, a liberal think tank, has tacitly admitted that only the threat of government-imposed taxation will motivate consumers to purchase health insurance coverage under Obamacare, which has so epically failed to control costs.
Standing in solidarity with the increasingly socialist wing of her party, Pelosi went a step further, pitching the possibility of full government control of health care through a Bernie Sanders-style “Medicare For All” initiative.
“All of it is on the table for discussion, whether it’s Medicare for all, single payer or just pushing forward to expand the Affordable Care Act. They all have the same goal, and we look forward to having those discussions,” Pelosi said.
In other words, if you think Obamacare was an abject failure, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
As we found out in November, Obamacare premiums were expected to skyrocket by 36 percent in Wisconsin this year. Nationally, the average cost of the cheapest silver tier plan soared 32 percent, with 15 states seeing a 40 percent increase, according to the Urban Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Worse, 75,000 Wisconsinites were expected to lose their coverage because insurers have abandoned Wisconsin’s Obamacare market.
Pelosi and her pals on the left would double down on their failed health care law and push Americans into an even costlier “Medicare for All” scheme, effectively socializing medicine. The brainchild of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and applauded by uber-liberals like Wisconsin U.S Sen. Tammy Baldwin, the price tag for this single-payer health care system is pegged at $32 trillion over 10 years. It would break the bank of a nation already $20 trillion in debt.
Democrats gave us the failure of the “Affordable” Care Act and all of its broken promises. They can keep Obamacare and Medicare For All – to themselves.
When Sanders first proposed what has been billed as his “delusional promise,” Medicare for All was generally seen for what it is: delusional. Now, it has become the rallying cry of many in the Democratic Party. A Real Clear Politics analysis found 17 out of 24 swing-district Democratic congressional candidates support Medicare for All or some form of a universal government-run health care plan as part of a fix to Obamacare.
This feel-good legislation, like most liberal ideas, collapses under the weight of reality. As Robert E. Moffit, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for health policy noted last year in Fortune, traditional Medicare is not an exclusively single-payer system because most of its participants must rely on private plans to fill gaps in coverage. And Medicare, like other entitlement programs, is plagued by costly regulations, stunningly low physician reimbursement rates, and tens of trillions of dollars in long-term obligations borne by taxpayers.
This is the salvation Pelosi and progressives want to bring to America’s already troubled health care system?
Democrats gave us the failure of the “Affordable” Care Act and all of its broken promises. They can keep Obamacare and Medicare For All – to themselves.