“Medicare for all”. Perfect. Gee, why didn’t we think of this before?
The premise of “Medicare for all” is that Medicare is great. But is it?
Medicare isn’t worth much unless you have secondary insurance. Ask any retiree. It’s called “Medigap”. If you try using Medicare without Medigap — semi-private insurance which Kamala Harris wants to outlaw, by the way — then you won’t be nearly as happy with Medicare. So much for a government-run insurance program.
Medicare depends on a for-profit hospital and medical care sector in order to survive. Without that sector, there would be precious little for Medicare to cover. Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea all have guaranteed health insurance. So what? There’s no medical, for-profit sector in those countries. There’s no private sector at all, because profit is outlawed. Democrats — being socialists and Communists themselves — want profit to go away. Without the self-interest, competence, efficiency and incentives inspired by profit, what will there be for Medicare to cover?
If Medicare takes over the entire health insurance and medical industry, what will medicine look like? And how will it be implemented? Will doctors and hospitals have the right to opt out? We already know the answer to that question. Kamala Harris no doubt speaks for all Democrats when she says, “Get rid of the private health insurance plans. Move on.” In effect, this means doctors and patients will have no right to contract or find other innovative or creative ways to fund their medical care, perhaps ones not yet discovered. It will all be government-run. That means: Communistic. That means: Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela. It’s just a fact. It means: The post office — without UPS or Fedex — for your heart disease, your cancer, your clinical depression, and your COPD.
Medicare for all counts on the unthinking and ignorant people supporting it to assume that Medicare is great. But Medicare is not great. It’s filled with red tape and contradictory, downright bizarre regulations. Smaller practitioners cannot deal with it. My own primary care doctor opted out just this year. Mental health professionals like myself — most of us in solo or small private practices — gave up on it long ago. It’s a futile and impossible system that only big corporations and big corporate hospitals can handle — so long as they can afford to hire an army of accountants and bureaucrats greater in number than actual doctors and nurses.
Medicare stinks. Medicare for all? It will be a catastrophe. The ignorance on this subject is astonishing. Until you look at the type of people half of our electorate is putting into high office. I guess then it’s easier to understand how something so incredibly stupid is being proposed, and may actually happen.
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