Kamala is no moderate on health care
| First published October 7 … worth a fresh look as January 20 draws near
| OPINION, Fox Business – On the same day last month both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris suffered the same revealing slip of the tongue. They each referred to the coming “Harris-Biden administration.”
There’s no mistaking that Harris has openly assumed the role of heir-apparent to Biden.
The 78-years-old former vice president is bound to be considered a lame duck from the day he is sworn in. And that may mark the moment when Kamala Harris abandons the pretense that she is some kind of moderate on health care.
Harris was, after all, was the very first co-sponsor of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2017 “Medicare-for-all” bill, which would have outlawed private coverage and initiated a government takeover of the health insurance system. She endorsed Sanders’s second legislative bid for Medicare-for-All in 2019, too.
The Sanders plan is breathtaking in its radicalism. By ending private insurance, it would put 1.8 million Americans out of work, according to research from economists at the University of Massachusetts.
Estimates of the federal spending necessary to pay for the brand of health care reform that Harris, Sanders, and the progressive wing of the party favor vary from enormous to astounding.
Most studies put the price tag between $30 trillion and $40 trillion in its first 10 years. Those estimates may be low, as they assume massive cuts in payments to doctors and hospitals that are unlikely to happen.
For perspective, the total federal budget for fiscal year 2019, pre-COVID, was $4.4 trillion …Read more.
Sally C. Pipes is President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All (Encounter 2020). Follow her on Twitter @sallypipes.
ALSO ON HEADLINE HEALTH TODAY: Chuck Yeager, 97 | MLB Ump Charged With Sex Crime | Communist Attacks On US Diplomats Explained
