Abdul is calling for “free healthcare,” knowing it is a great lure. The same old Stalincare lies are repeating themselves, only now it is coming from a radical Islamist communist with a frozen smile. “Free Healthcare” is unaffordable. Far-left Vermont looked into it, wanted to do it, and realized it was unaffordable.
In 2011, Vermont passed a law to create a state single-payer health care system called Green Mountain Care. In December 2014, then-Governor Peter Shumlin abandoned the plan before it ever started. He did not go bankrupt, but he stopped the program because the required taxes—including an 11.5% business payroll tax and up to a 9.5% individual income tax—were too high and risked major economic shock.
It would only have gotten worse. That was in 2014.
El-Sayed’s Soviet Healthcare:
Kristen Welker: Some Americans worry you can only make Medicare free and universal if you increase taxes. Would you need to do that?
Abdul El Sayed: Imagine if instead of paying that to your health insurance company, whose CEO makes $20 million a year, instead you paid a little bit more in taxes for healthcare that you wouldn’t lose. I think all of us would be a lot more interested in that kind of system if we knew our healthcare would be free at the point of care.
Nice how he gets the class warfare into the conversation. We already see how it works. It’s Obamacare on steroids. And Mr. El Sayed does not have our best interests at heart.
WELKER: Some Americans worry you can only make Medicare free and universal if you increase taxes. Would you need to do that?
EL-SAYED: Imagine if instead of paying that to your health insurance company, whose CEO makes $20m a year, instead you paid a little bit more in taxes for… pic.twitter.com/WdSz3V17V8
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 9, 2026
The far left never bothers with the mathematics.
A neurosurgeon called into the Mark Levin show in November 2011 to report that, in that past week, HHS informed an assembly of neurosurgeons in D.C. that a new rule required them to hold off on brain surgery for people over 70 years of age until the new HHS (Health & Human Services) ethics panel “reviewed” the case.
This philosophy towards the gray masses is integral to the Russian single-payer system. The older and the truly infirm do not receive care. In fact, all receive the kind of care that would make one proud in 1900.
Von Mises reported on the reality of Russian single-payer healthcare.
In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal “cradle-to-grave” healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The “right to health” became a “constitutional right” of Soviet citizens. They planned to reduce costs and waste, just like what we heard from Obama, and now El Sayed.
After nearly a hundred years, the Russians are about a hundred years behind us in healthcare. Their medical institutions were filthy, and soap was noticeably absent. Cats roamed the halls, and drunken personnel were a familiar sight; 78% of HIV patients caught it from dirty needles in state-run hospitals.
Neurosurgeons received a salary about one-third that of a bus driver, which understandably discouraged the best and brightest from entering the medical field. If you want to see a doctor in Russia, you’d better have your bribe ready.
There is no legal remedy under their single-payer system, so their continual neglect and ineptitude goes unchallenged.
Best yet, they have a two-tier system, one for the gray masses and the other for the bureaucrats and intellectuals; the gray masses, of course, receive the inferior, almost nonexistent service.
Rationing for the over-70 crowd is a real part of the single-payer healthcare system in Russia, and obviously it is coming to a hospital near you.
The Von Mises report is from 2011, but today, the quality of Russian healthcare varies, and outside the cities, it’s deplorable.
It won’t be free and his math doesn’t hold up. The middle class gets screwed. If they make under a million dollars, they will be screwed.
🚨 HOLY CRAP! In a stunning moment, Michigan Senate candidate Abdulrahman Mohamed El Sayed (D) says the middle class will pay MORE TAXES under his socialist healthcare program
"It would be free at the POINT OF CARE."
"That's a trade worth making."
WELKER: You are acknowledging… pic.twitter.com/Nv5rvdkvwy
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 9, 2026
