This is a profoundly stupid statement from Senator Bernie Sanders, and while there is a lot more to unpack here, I'll settle for now that it goes to the heart of why any health care measure this Congress will consider is doomed to be a disaster for consumers:
(About 3:42 in of this CSPAN video)
"The day will come, although I recognize it is not today, when the United States Congress will have the courage to stand up to the private insurance companies, and the drug companies, and the medical equipment suppliers, and all of those who profit and make billions of dollars every single year off of human sickness. And on that day when it comes, and it will come, the United States Congress will finally proclaim that health care is a right of all people and not just a privilege. And that day will come, as surely as I stand here today. "
Why is it profoundly stupid? Just substitute the basic human need for food into that kind of thinking:
"The day will come, although I recognize it is not today, when the United States Congress will have the courage to stand up to the private grocery companies, and the food processors, and the farmers, and all of those who profit and make billions of dollars every single year off of human hunger. And on that day when it comes, and it will come, the United States Congress will finally proclaim that food is a right of all people and not just a privilege. And that day will come, as surely as I stand here today."
One can do the same for the basic human need of shelter, just change the villains to developers, and builders, and mortgage lenders. Not to mention countless other industries that provide the cornucopia of goods and services that we think of now as essential, even though they are well beyond what we need to survive. The notion of the government controlling those markets to the same extent that they now envision controlling health care is ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is that the normal profit incentive to provide consumers what they want at the best price is somehow suspended when it comes to health care. At least I hope it seems ridiculous.
Health care bears a heavier burden because it is the last line of salvation and a decent society will, in practice, help those who need care regardless of ability to pay. Instead of recognizing those costs outright though, when it comes to health care we have had more than 40 years of government interference that has shifted and obscured costs in a ponzi scheme called Medicare, and more, that is doomed to fail eventually. Senator Sanders solution is to essentially declare "everybody in", in a desperate measure to keep it all from collapsing.
It won't work. In fact, it's pretty much madness.
The way out of the very real health care problems we face today and in the future is not through more government intervention in the marketplace, it's through less. Instead of making the government more central in providing health care, we need to make the consumer the center by fostering private sector competition and innovation and giving consumers more choice on who gets their dollars. And that means not just insurance companies, but through those insurance companies, the providers themselves. If the vast majority needs to subsidize those who can't pay, then we should do that openly and without introducing all sorts of obfuscations and cost shifting.
A 2,000 plus page bill is not going to remove the perverse market distortions, incentives, and disincentives that have built up over the last 40 years and gotten us to where we are today. It's just going to add to them, and how can it not?
Senator Sanders rails against "bureaucratic waste" and then demands that we all march into the largest, most wasteful, and most bureaucratic health care insurance in the US today: Medicare.
Madness.
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