Even the far-left NY Magazine says Kamala’s ever-changing positions on Medicare For All [actually Medicaid For All if we’re lucky] “makes no sense.” She wants to eliminate private health insurance for 200 million people, but, not to worry, she won’t raise taxes. Her estimated costs will come to $3.2 trillion each year but she thinks she will get that money from financial transactions even though no country with Single Payer has ever implemented one without significant middle-class tax increases.
There is no way to move almost all healthcare spending onto the government’s books without large broad-based tax increases.
The current federal budget is $4.47 trillion with revenues of $3.2 trillion. Despite the tax cuts, revenue was up by 2% because of tax cuts. They work. Her healthcare budget will cost $3.2 trillion a year.
At the same time, Kamala Harris is claiming she will massively cut middle-class taxes. As NY Mag says, it makes no sense and hasn’t from the beginning.
“Kamala Harris’s position on Medicare for All has never made much sense,” writes author Eric Levitz.
In which Jake asks Kamala Harris whether people would be able to keep their private insurance, if they prefer, under Medicare For All system — and she rejects that. “Let’s eliminate all of that. Let’s move on.” pic.twitter.com/A1AY2TOT4g
— Rebecca Buck (@RebeccaBuck) January 29, 2019
At a town hall in January, she said she supported eliminating private health insurance except for anything not covered by government healthcare, such as cosmetic surgery. The current Bernie Sanders Medicare For All plan, which she says she supports, covers vision, dental, hearing, long-term care, all health care needs, abortion, and free healthcare for illegal aliens.
Question: “So people who have private insurance would eventually have to give that up under your plan?”
Sen. Kamala Harris: “They would eventually be covered under Medicare for all and they would still see their doctor. And that’s what they want.” pic.twitter.com/yUm9Nqx39U
— The Hill (@thehill) July 17, 2019
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There was the expected backlash at this extreme, communistic position and she tried to walk it back, but, as CNN put it, her ‘walking back’ was only saying she was comfortable with multiple paths to Single Payer without competitive private insurance.
Levitz describes her flip-flopping and her many obfuscations, but in the end, she plans the elimination of private health insurance. That is the bottom line for all the Democratic candidates.
Medicare For All, by its very nature, will decimate private health insurance. Bernie Sanders’ plan doesn’t legally ban it and it will allow the rich to get better access.
Levitz writes, “But the substantive absurdity of Harris’s health-care position is less puzzling than its political incoherence. It would be one thing for Harris to cynically embrace the popular aspects of Medicare for All, while disavowing the unpopular provisions that make those goodies possible. She wouldn’t be the first presidential candidate to campaign on a beautiful lie. But that isn’t what she’s doing. Rather, she is effectively taking ownership of an unpopular, peripheral feature of Sanders’s plan (the elimination of duplicative private insurance), while disavowing an unpopular provision that is fundamental to his vision for single-payer (broad-based tax increases to replace private-insurance premiums).”
She is leaving a lot of voters very confused, and even the left knows it.
Levitz concludes cynically but accurately, “But it is already impossible for “clarity and consistency on Medicare for All” to be one of Harris’s strengths as a candidate. At this point, her best bet on health-care policy might be to stop worrying about “flip-flops” — and start telling voters whatever her consultants say they want to hear.”
