Daniel Horowitz:
Republicans have always specialized in running candidates that accept the most important premises of liberal governance and make themselves indistinguishable from their Democrat counterparts. They should patent their pale pastels, which blend in so effectively there is no discernable ink contrasting their talking points to Democrat policies.
In 2012, Republicans concocted a brilliant electoral plan. In an race fought over healthcare, they managed to nominate the only human being in America who implemented Obamacare before President Obama did. Now that the Democrat front-runner is Hillary Clinton, the original god-mother of single-payer healthcare, Republicans are on the cusp of nominating the one man in the GOP who has long championed Marxist healthcare policies.
In case anyone thought Donald Trump has indeed undergone a cathartic change since deciding to run for president and is no longer promoting New York values, he wants everyone to know if you oppose universal healthcare, you don’t have a heart. Here is what he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos this morning:
We’re going to work with our hospitals. We’re going to work with our doctors. We’ve got to do something. You can’t have a — a small percentage of our economy, because they’re down and out, have absolutely no protection so they end up dying from, you know, what you could have a simple procedure or even a pill. You can’t do that. We’ll work something out. That doesn’t mean single payer. And I mean, maybe he’s got no heart. And if this means I lose an election, that’s fine, because, frankly, we have to take care of the people in our country. We can’t let them die on the sidewalks of New York or the sidewalks of Iowa or anywhere else.
Somehow Trump “opposes” Obamacare, but believes that if you don’t champion something similar to it you have no heart. He declined to defend “single-payer,” which he championed for years, but left out the fact that he praised Canada and Scotland’s dysfunctional Marxist system during one of the early presidential debates.
What’s worse than Trump’s support for the Democrat position on healthcare (wait, how is he going to debate Hillary again?) is the way he articulates this position. He uses the most antiquated tool in the Marxist/Alinsky shed, which is to play on emotions over intelligence, thereby achieving neither sound policy nor compassionate outcomes. Let’s not even discuss the constitutional powers of government; evidently that is never a factor with Trump.
Had Trump spent more time studying the government he seeks to run instead of pandering for the endorsements of Bob Dole and his less charismatic mini-me, Terry Branstad, The Donald would understand that we already spend hundreds of billions on Medicaid, S-Chip, and an array of state programs for those who would “die on the sidewalks” because they have no money. Medicaid alone will cost us $350 billion this year. The “dying on the sidewalk” Alinsky argument is a non-sequitur. The real question is what happens with the rest of us. Either we are all forced into single-payer, which has been Trump’s long-standing position. Or we are forced into something similar to Obamacare’s coverage mandates that he won’t specify. Here are the results of such a plan from my personal experience:
This is the outcome of a liberal “heart” in which no middle class family will be able to afford health insurance with dignity. When you pursue increased coverage at the expense of reducing costs you achieve neither objective. I can’t wait to see the premiums under Trump-care. Then again, under single-payer the problems will go much further than health insurance but will spill over to healthcare itself. Perhaps he will then take his rode show onto universal housing, college, and transportation.
I missed this interview.
But I have heard Donald Trump discuss healthcare.
He 1. wants to eliminate state line limits on insurers.
That would lower costs because there would be more competition. It would also make it easier if you move out of one state and into another.
2. allow veterans to see a local (non-VA) doctor or hospital if the VA one cannot see him quickly.
That would eliminate these extraordinary long wait times the veterans suffer with now.
3. focus on those truly poor and needy, not those who waste and abuse.
That will take firing some administrators, even streamlining some programs. If you recall, not one VA administrator has been fired. Rather whistle blowers have been punished. Trump will reward whistle blowers who expose inefficiencies and shortcomings.
4 abandon the wasteful and archaic mindset of the public sector with regards medicine. Trump is a proponent of a new innovation we see in Utah, the telehealth tool. Here, for $45 you can ”see” a doctor via your computer with camera so he and you can show and explain. He can even prescribe for you directly to your pharmacy. It’s the wave of the future.
Nanny, there is one glaring problem that Medicaid, Tricare and all.the obamacare plans have that is consistently overlooked by those who keep pushing for more government involvement/control of healthcare. That is the fact that the payment to medical providers from these plans is so low that a growing number of physicians will not accept those plans. Let me give you an example.
In my town of about 180,000 people, NONE of the general pediatricians in private practice will accept patients covered by Medicaid. The reason? It costs the pediatrician more money to see the patient than what Medicaid will pay. The vast majority of these patients are seen by nurse practioners, and a small portion are seen by the medical school pediatric resident group – which means seeing a different resident physician almost every visit. (Medicaid pays medical schools more than private physicians, to offset the costs associated with training residents – and residents get paid 25-35% of what a board certified/board eligible physician is paid. Residents are not yet having to pay their medical school loans, generally at least $200-250,000.)
So the path of government run health insurance that will continue to pay less than what a physician can accept to stay in business will result in continued refusal by physicians to accept these patients. The inevitable development, when enough people start badgering politicians about not being able to find a doctor, will be laws forcing physicians to accept all or a minimum percentage of patients with government run insurance in order to keep a medical license. This will.be a disaster, and push us even further down the path of a national socialist government controlled medical system.
Imagine the effect on plumbers, bakers, car dealerships, or any other industry being forced by government to accept payment for.goods and services below the cost of providing such goods and services. How long before shortages occur, as well as increased business closures?
Being able to purchase insurance across state lines is a reasonable concept, but not if the government is going to insist that every person has the exact same coverage. It makes no sense for example for a 50 year old childless couple to be forced to pay for unnecessary pediatric and maternity care which they will never use. All that does is drive up the cost of the insurance.
The know-it-all bureaucrats swore to us that obamacare would save an average of $2500 a year on family medical insurance, and that it would bend the cost curve down. As we all know now -and as was predicted by obamacare critics – costs have gone through the roof, while providing less coverage than before obamacare. The government plays bait and switch on insurance costs by subsidizing premiums, but even that has not stopped huge financial losses, and only added to the national debt.
More government control of medicine can only result in increasing shortages and higher costs, no matter how good one may feel about providing essentially useless insurance coverage.
@Pete: I think the key issue I have with your statement is that this:
somehow applies to Donald Trump in 2016.
His stated goals with regard reforming ObamaCare and the VA is to get both modernized, (like the video doctor visits)
streamlined, (out with the waste and bloated gov’t programs)
and more into the private sector (he wants veterans to be able to see any doctor, go to any hospital and he wants private insurers to be able to cross state lines with their policies so as to increase competition.)
People keep calling to mind old statements he made from before he was even in politics as if they will be his set-in-stone answers in the future.
I don’t know if writers like Daniel Horowitz (and others) are simply ill-informed as to his views OR if they are deliberately trying to turn people away from him via articles written based on old, sometimes very old and out of context, statements.
I do know I listened to his stump speech recently and he wants the gov’t ”safety net” to stop being a hammock. He wants to winnow off the dole all those fakers and takers. He even wants to lose those lazy-ass federal workers who sit around doing nothing all day.
What he wants to do is ambitious.
If he gets 50% of it in a first term it will be a real improvement.