It looks, at least at the moment, like Kamala Harris is the chosen one for the Democrat big wigs and the liberal media. Heck, even Joe Scarborough has given up all pretense of being a Republican and is squeeing over her. But she, like so many Democrats, isn’t even hiding how utterly far left she nor what she wants
California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris, speaking during a town hall Monday night, vowed to eliminate all private health care insurance for approximately 150 million Americans if she is elected president.
Asked by CNN host Jake Tapper if people who like their current health care insurance could keep it under Harris’ “Medicare for All” plan, Harris indicated they could not — but that, in turn, they would experience health care without any delays.
Her statements appeared to be a full-throated call for single-payer health insurance, as opposed to merely expanding Medicare, and a dramatic embrace of the kind of proposals advocated by Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care. And you don’t have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require,” Harris told Tapper.
Right, so now we would have to wait for the federal government, always renowned for its speed at doing things, to approve the medical process, deciding you aren’t worth the knee operation and should just get some pain pills and a cane. Too bad Jake Tapper didn’t ask her how she would pay for it.
In August 2017, Harris became the first Senate Democrat to support Sanders’ “Medicare for All” bill. The program, if implemented, would cost tens of trillions of dollars over a decade, experts say.
Several independent studies have specifically estimated that government spending on health care would surge by $25 trillion to $35 trillion or more in a 10-year period. A study released over the summer by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, for example, estimated that Sanders’ program would cost $32.6 trillion — $3.26 trillion per year — over a decade. By comparison, the federal budget proposal for the fiscal year 2019 was $4.4 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office states.
Now just imagine what pure single payer would cost. How much your taxes would go up. Sure, you’d eliminate premiums and probably deductibles, but, you’d end up paying more overall.
Also
Speaking separately in response to a gun rights question at Monday’s town hall, Harris urged a ban on “assault weapons,” without defining the term.
“There is no reason in a civil society that we have assault weapons around communities that can kill babies and police officers,” Harris said to applause. “Something like universal background checks — it makes perfect sense that you might want to know before someone can buy a weapon that can kill another human being, you might want to know have they been convicted of a felony where they committed violence? That’s just reasonable. You might want to know before they can buy that gun if a court has found them to be a danger to themselves or others. You just might want to know. That’s reasonable.”
Which we mostly have now. California has this, and it has failed again and again. As for “assault weapons”, does she plan to come around and confiscated those who have them now? Good luck with that.
#HarrisTownHall Since when did you or your party start caring about killing babies?
— John W. Simpson (@Bravehartsfire) January 29, 2019
Or police officers.
How does every other advanced nation on this Earth deliver healthcare to ALL their residents for much less per person than the US?
The working class folks in the US pay for their healthcare through reduced wages, taxes, premiums, co-pays etc. And it is still often a hassle.
By the way, we now spend more on healthcare than the $3.26 trillion per year mentioned in the article! Accordingly, we would SAVE money!
The Brown Bernie with a vagina.
What could go wrong?
Every other advanced nation on earth does not “deliver” healthcare to ALL their residents. Most of them provide unacceptably limited healthcare at an unacceptably low rate and an unacceptably long wait time than we Americans are willing to accept. They also have a dirty little secret of a two tier system. One level for the elite and one for the rest of the riff-raff (that would be you and me). Plus they don’t have 335 million people of assorted races and heritages which bring their own types of inherent disease. There is no Tay-Sachs in Korea nor Sickle Cell Disease in Japan. Treating a homogeneous population of 8 or ten million or even 40 or 80 million is significantly less difficult than providing for 335 million people of assorted and sundry needs.
But beside that, Americans love choice. I like to choose what I want. Why is the only choice the left wants is for abortion? They don’t want us to choose our doctors or health insurance, nor any car not electric, nor what size drink to order nor whether or not to own firearms but man they are sure steadfast on the right to choose abortion!
Because health care isn’t uniform and most countries’ is much worse than ours, as the people who can afford to come here will tell any doctor or nurse they meet.
The working class folks in the US pay for their healthcare through reduced wages
First, what is this folks nonsense? Is Becky Lou trying to tell us she comes from the Ozarks?
Second, most working stiffs see it as a good investment.
Third, that great healthcare means you wait years for treatment or surgery.
Assuming you live that long.
1. The way other countries spend less is they do less.
2. We also spend more on cars, washing machines, electricity, Cable TV, smart phones, and every other category of commerce and trade. Spending more is a good thing. It is a measure of consumers, making themselves happy and healthy by consuming.
3. Other countries don’t have a national law requiring hospitals emergency rooms to be open to treat anyone who walks in, with the best service possible, regardless of their ability to pay.
4. America also pays more in global charitable contributions to other countries. We should cut back on that too, while we are at it. In India, Blovia and Africa, you might get free health care services, paid for by Americans. Both by private charities and USAID government programs.
The Danes, Norwegians, Finns, Swedes, Swiss, Germans etc seem quite satisfied with their health care systems. And they pay less and live longer than Americans.
Our for-profit system is expensive and doesn’t even include all Americans.
If you like choice, why wouldn’t you choose to pay much less for health insurance??
Do they?
Take all those people shot in Democrat gun controlled cities and we live longer.
If you like choice, why wouldn’t you choose to pay much less for health insurance??
If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.
When you pay “much less” you receive much less. Nothing is free except in the mind of a leftist. Our for profit system needs a great deal of improvement but that does not mean we should scrap it for a pig-in-a-poke. I would like to point out that all Americans are included in our health care system. All Americans aren’t paying health insurance premiums and all Americans aren’t covered by health insurance but all Americans are covered by health care.
BTW, when you point out Danes, Norwegians, Finns, Swedes, Swiss and Germans you are pointing to: 1. small populations and 2. homogeneous populations 3. countries with a lot of “free money” since we’ve been paying for their security for 85 years so they have tons of cash to burn 4. you really need to explore the real opinions in these countries where you seem to thing they are all satisfied.
Maybe if you guys on the left had a grown-up willing to talk about real ways to fix or system, keep freedom of choice for the consumer/patient, keep the 2-3 million people in the insurance industry working, keep control of our health and ultimately our life out of the hands of government (after all we are not Nazi’s or communists, yet) and open your mind to solving the problem and not advancing an agenda we could actually accomplish a great free market open and honest system. Kameltoe Harris is not that grown-up.
This is wrong. On so many levels.
First of all the woman is vowing to end all Insurance corporations. Who will absorb the jobs these insurance agencies create? Incidently there are very few minimum wage jobs within the insurance industry.
There are roughly 2.5-3.0 million people employed by the insurance industry. Part of the democrats plan is to give everyone who wants a job a government job. Now we swell the rolls of the government by 3 million people just to cover the Medicare for all.
What could go wrong. 3 million times 125,000.00 per year because of the cost of all the benefits associated with working for the government. This amount will swell because we are of course talking about the US government. That will translate to roughly 3-4 trillion dollars over 10 years.
Second biggest problem with medicare for all an eliminating the insurance industry is that companies now buy health care insurance on the order of between 150-450 per month to cover what part A and B does not cover. Eliminating this feature is seriously going to harm AARP and many other benevolent organizations creating further layoffs.
Thirdly If the government is to pick up the entire cost of universal health care then what incentive does drug companies and medical devices companies have for creating new drugs or new equiptment. Additionally what incentive do heart surgeons and brain surgeons have for spending 4-6 extra years in training to earn 50,000 more dollars per year. The average taken from Canadian and UK socialized medicine pay scales.
Then of course by eliminating all of the insurance benefits which means drastically cutting costs and eliminatining profits what incentives do 10’s of thousands of hospitals and clinics have for staying open?
In order to curtail costs and keep it affordable there will be another 2-3 million nurses, staff and Illegal aliens working for hospitals losing their jobs.
Health care in the United States has taken a hundred years to establish itself. Suddenly or even gradually ending the 7-10 million jobs and then putting them on the government dole will only swell the cost of health care not SAVE MONEY.
Additionally the pie in the sky concept of we spend X today and the cost of Medicare for all will cost Y therefore it is cheaper is a pipe dream of biblical proportions.
The cost of adopting universal healthcare in this country would be staggering and would created a massively bloated bureacracy because of the need to FUND not only doctors but to fund hospitals and clinics to stay open to served 325,000,000,000 people.
The cost in the long run would be more like 7 trillion and remember you are only paying for this by taxes. Which would be humongougly hefty and drive up the prices of everything because everyone knows that Employeers including small businesses would have to pony up huge sums of premiums to pay for this.
Also let us not forget that even in the EU and Canada they use insurance companies to help defray the cost of Universal health care. Eliminating all insurance companies would bankrupt this nation so quickly and destroy health care in our country as to be mind numbing.
Just think of the costs associated with one town or one state and then extrapolate that over 100,000’s of towns and fifty states.
You sir are in egregious error and your talking point is a fallacy meant to deflect and deceive. You have no idea the cost associated with moving from an insurance based industry to government run health care and to pretend you do is absurd. Anyone that would support this nonsense is living in an alternate reality from the true costs associated with destroying and then rebuilding an entire sector of our 20 trillion dollar economy.
And not only does the LEFT want to do it to one sector. They want to do it to 4 sectors. Transportation. Energy. Medical and Education. It is obvious the left has gone full blown communist. This is beyond Socialist.
So Americans spend an unnecessary $1 trillion a year on healthcare to keep high paid insurers solvent? Working class folks are paying out the wazoo to keep rich folks rich? Talk about re-distribution!
When autos were popularized the horse and buggy industry cratered.
Anyway, she said to eliminate private insurance, not the insurance companies or workers.
Is Israel a communist country? They have universal health care. Australia? Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan etc? Almost all the advanced nations have a mixed system of public and private inputs and do it for much less than we do – and they cover all their citizens.
The US introduced Social Security and then Medicare to reduce poverty in the elderly. Insurance companies couldn’t cover the elderly because it was too expensive.
Do they?
Define what you mean by the term “unnecessary”.
Working class
folkspeople are not paying out the wazoo to keep rich folks rich. That was ZippyCare.she said to eliminate private insurance, not the insurance companies or workers
Sure. Kill the company and the workers will just go humming along.
Israel is socialist and whatever mix the rest have is still mostly socialist with the good coverage for those who can afford it.
Bessie Mae thinks people have never heard this stuff.
The US introduced Social Security and then Medicare to reduce poverty in the elderly.
Sure it did.
In the original Social Security Act, the word, tax, is used 38 times. It’s a second income tax with no exemptions or deductions. In 1942, when it first went into effect, it only covered people who worked outside the home and set the retirement age at 65. This is when antibiotics weren’t in general use and everybody smoked.
Who worked outside the home? Men.
What was their life expectancy? 62.
Roosevelt figured he’d never have to pay that money. So spare me the bull about reducing poverty.
A George Soros jackanape.
From our Well, That Was Quick File comes news the California Courtesan is already backpedaling on her plan to eliminate private insurance.
Too bad. Everybody so wanted to go back to ZippyCare.
Medicare for all cannot work because the reimbursements to doctors and hospitals is below the cost to produce the service. Doctors and hospitals make up for this by shifting costs to other customers, those with better insurance. If those other insurance companies stop paying the bills, the hospitals close and the doctors become truck drivers. Medicare can get away with it only because they use the force of law to set prices and the rest of the market place covers the losses. If everyone is on medicare, it fails fast and hard. Socialism only ever works when a parallel capitalist system is there to pay the bills.