Today’s post is a history lesson for all those paying attention. In 2010 the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare, without a single Republican vote. It was implemented in 2014 and people quickly came to realize it was not what it was cracked up to be. Rather than a panacea for rising healthcare costs, it drove them even higher.
President Obama made several promises then including the famous “If you like your healthcare plan you can keep your healthcare plan” which turned out to be lies. He promised ObamaCare would reduce healthcare premiums by $2500 per person per year but in fact they only increased. Less than five years later in 2018 insurance premiums doubled for individuals and rose 140% for families, even while deductibles increased substantially.
Democrats said the solution was to convert ObamaCare into single-payer healthcare; a government guarantee for all medical care they insisted would be “free.” The British have such a system called The National Health Service, which was established by the constitution, and says: “You have the right to receive NHS services free of charge.” But they ignore the fact that the U.K. funds the program by taxing citizens some $160 billion a year, even with its severe limits on access to specialists, drugs and technology.
Dr. Scott Atlas wrote of the problems of such a system in 2018 in The Wall Street Journal. Here is what he said then: “In the past half-century, nationalized programs have consistently failed to provide timely, high-quality medical care compared with the U.S. system. That failure has countless consequences for citizens: pain, suffering and death, permanent disability, and foregone wages.”
“Single-payer programs usually impose long waiting lists and delays unheard of in the U.S. Last year, a record 4.2 million patients were on England’s NHS waiting lists; 362,600 patients waited longer than four months for hospital treatment as of that March, and 95,252 waited longer than six months. By this July, 4,300 people had been on the wait list more than a year—all after receiving their diagnosis and referral—according to NHS England’s “Referral to Treatment” waiting-times data.”
The same was true in Canada. In 2018, the median wait time between seeing a general practitioner and following up with a specialist was 10.2 weeks, while the wait between seeing a doctor and beginning treatment was about five months. According to the Fraser Institute study, the average Canadian waited three months to see an ophthalmologist, four months for an orthopedist, and five months for a neurosurgeon.
This issue came up in the mid-term elections of 2018 and was promoted by socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in a slick campaign called “Medicare for All.” Then Senator Kamala Harris jumped on the bandwagon, endorsing Sanders’ socialized medicine plan. It is doubtful you’ll hear her say the same thing now, but her record is clear.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board wants you to remember this important history since Democrats are trying to re-write history. Here’s what the editors say: “Harris campaign aides are whispering that she no longer supports single-payer healthcare, but travel back to Ms. Harris’s Senate tenure. She co-sponsored a bill from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders that would set up a single-payer system in the U.S. in four years. That would toss 150 million Americans who receive health insurance at work into a new government plan, inevitably financed by ferocious tax increases across every income level.
At a Democratic debate in 2019, a moderator put this question to the primary contenders: ‘Many people watching at home have health insurance through their employer. Who here would abolish their private health insurance in favor of a government-run plan?’ Ms. Harris raised her hand.”
The WSJ editors say the Harris plan from 2019 could cost $44 trillion over a decade, according to a forthcoming analysis from health economist Stephen Parente and Theo Merkel at the American Action Forum. That includes some $1.8 trillion to cover some 11 million illegal immigrants. America can’t afford this and doesn’t want this even if it could.
