Single Payer: A Toxic Brew of Politics and Medicine
The Left’s dream of socialized medicine is still kicking around. The Left has been salivating for single payer for a hundred years, and they’re not about to give up now.
A single payer healthcare proposal made it out of a committee in California’s legislative Assembly earlier this week. Governor Gavin Newsom campaigned on single payer in 2018, but a separate measure would have to be put to the voters to fund the gargantuan program with huge tax increases. Even then, the tax increases being proposed would only bring in less than half of what single payer was estimated to cost when it was considered in 2018. Unsurprisingly, there are no cost estimates this time, because the idea was shelved in 2018 after Californians realized how much it would cost. The same reality check occurred some years ago in Vermont. Single payer died there when it became known payroll taxes would have to consume 25 percent of everyone’s paycheck to pay for it.
The radical California Nurses Association is pushing single payer, holding a ‘Day of Action’ in 15 California cities last Saturday. Leftists elsewhere in the country also continue to agitate for single payer. A nationwide march for single payer was also held last Saturday in all 50 states. Far-left publications recently urged their readers to continue to fight for single payer, although the publications are split on whether to fight at the national or state level. The Yale School of Medicine ran an editorial praising single payer and the resolution New Haven passed last August supporting Medicare for All for the entire country.
Similar resolutions passed in several New Jersey cities and Duluth last year. Single payer proposals are also kicking around in New York, Oregon, and Ohio. The idea has not been abandoned at the national level, either. Joe Biden’s Build Back Better proposal would put more building blocks in place by creating a public option for health insurance, increasing Obamacare subsidies, and ramping up Medicaid. Critics say this is just a stone’s throw away from single payer.
But no matter how you get there, single payer is still a bad idea. The stratospheric cost is reason enough to oppose single payer, not to mention the experience of the National Health System in Britain which shows such programs are continually broke and always pleading for more money. There’s never enough money for single payer and, when more money isn’t forthcoming, single payer is forced to ration your healthcare even more than it usually does. Long wait times and rationing, that’s the fate of anyone on single payer. It takes three years to get a tooth removed in Britain. Is that what you want?
Horror stories about rationing and long waits are familiar. But there’s another aspect of single payer that’s just as insidious that doesn’t get nearly enough attention. Healthcare would become completely politicized under single payer and, if private medicine is banned, you won’t have anywhere else to go. Look what’s happened recently in the pandemic. The federal government told Florida to pound Daytona Beach sand when the state asked for more monoclonal antibody treatments. The Woke FDA is saying life-saving COVID treatments should be doled out based on skin color. That’s despicable. We also have the spectacle of public health authorities falling all over themselves lately to tell everyone they need an N95 mask. Maryland’s going to give out 20 million of them. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, what this really means is everything you’ve been told about cloth masks for the last two years has been a lie – that cloth masks work and should be mandated. You’ve been fed a line of bull for political reasons. What do you think’s going to happen when the government gets its hands on all of healthcare under single payer? Every single aspect of medicine will become politicized. You will be told what healthcare you can have and no more. You will be told how to behave and what rules you must obey in order to get it. Too bad for you if Washington decides it doesn’t like your diet or your lifestyle choices. When rationing isn’t enough, we will have to bring the hammer down to make sure you don’t cost the government too much money for your healthcare.
And, of course, the politicians who pass single payer and implement it will exempt themselves from whatever rules they impose on the rest of us. That’s what happened in Obamacare with the congressional exemption. It’ll happen again in spades if you fall for single payer. You’ve been warned.
©Christopher Wrights. All rights reserved.
