The Democrats’ Next Play on Healthcare

March 26, 2017
Posted in Featured, U.S.
March 26, 2017 Tim Preuss

The Democrats’ Next Play on Healthcare

The Minority Leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi, called the pulling of the Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare a “victory for the American people” but make no mistakes about it, she and her fellow Democrats in Congress are planning on replacing Obamacare in the not too distant future. Donald Trump‘s plan is to wait for the collapse of Obamacare before Republicans again move to replace it. Democrats have the same plan, but what they wish to replace it with is something very different than the Republican vision.

Democrats and Republicans agree that the Affordable Care Act is deeply flawed and in need of, at a minimum, a few revisions. The promises that Obamacare was sold on have turned out to be lies. Patients were not able to keep their health insurance if they liked it, they were not able to keep their doctors if they liked them, and families have not, on average, saved $2,500 per year on their insurance premiums. Democrats have failed to keep their promises to Americans. Their promises to Americans were never meant to be kept, however. They were lies from the beginning.

Obamacare was designed to “fail”. Just because promises were broken, does not mean that Obamacare failed in its overall objective. The plan was designed to drive up insurance premiums, and throw employers into a whirlwind with regulations on numbers of employees, their hours, and mandated insurance coverage. Obamacare was designed to add miles of red tape to the practice of medicine, forcing hospitals to forego hiring nurses and instead hire accountants and attorneys. The chaos associated with Obamacare, which is set to become even worse in 2017, was planned from the beginning.

The first step was to destroy America’s existing healthcare infrastructure. The second step, yet to come, is the move to a single-payer, government run healthcare system. This Sunday, on an edition of CNN’s State of the Union, Senator Bernie Sanders brought up one of his presidential campaign’s key offers – healthcare as a right.

“Where we should be going is to join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee healthcare to all people as a right… Let us do, among other things, a public option. Let us give people in every state in this country a public option from which they can choose. Let’s talk about lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 55.”

During a debate with Republican Ted Cruz, Sanders insisted on America going the direction of Britain and Canada, and providing healthcare to all Americans. In Sanders’ view, healthcare is a right. With the current system, millions of people still do not have insurance, and his plan is not to enable those people to provide it for themselves, but to put the government in control and have a single-payer system.

The error in Sanders’ logic is two fold. First, he regularly makes the claim that healthcare is a “right”. In the traditional sense, healthcare, nor any good or service, can be a right. Having rights means that someone else has an obligation. The right to life leaves others with the obligation not to kill. They key word is NOT. The right to healthcare means that someone else still has an obligation, but an obligation TO do something. This is the difference between negative rights (such as those found in the Constitution) and positive rights (such as the things the left loves to give away).

The second problem with healthcare as a right, or single payer healthcare, is that America quite simply does not have the money to provide healthcare to everyone and for every ailment. Rationing will be a part of a single payer system, and even Sanders admits this. The difference is who should be in charge of the rationing? The market, or government? No doubt, government will attempt to hold off on rationing as long as possible, which would only mean a national debt even larger than it is today – the highest in the world – at nearly $20 trillion.

Regardless of the philosophical and fiscal problems with a single-payer system, this is the next step for Democrats, progressives, socialists, and statists. The growth of government, and with it, the growth of power for those in office, is the ultimate goal of the left. It cannot be left to Republicans in Washington to defend the freedoms of the people they represent. It is up to the people themselves to oppose single-payer healthcare on a grassroots level, to keep power out of the hands of people who at their best are woefully incompetent, and at their worst are power-hungry political animals.





Tim Preuss

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