The audience of Upper West Side
Single-Payer Health Care
New Yorkers, whom one would expect to be of lefty tendencies,
On September 14, Bernie Sanders introduced the “Medicare For All” bill in the U.S. Senate. With today’s Congress and president, it hasn’t a hope in hell of passing. But what’s frightening about the “MFA” plan for the federal government to control all of America’s doctors, nurses, hospitals, and clinics, is that the bill had 16 co-sponsors. The co-sponsors include Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, and California Senator Kamala Harris – the so-called “Democrats of the Future.” ( More on Kamala in this issue here. ) Come 2018, control of the Senate and maybe the House could fall into the hands of Warren, Booker, Harris, and their ilk. Quite a fall that would be. And the presidency could take the same tumble in 2020. Even more frightening are some recent public-opinion survey numbers pertaining to “Medicare For All.” A September poll by Politico /Morning Consult showed 46% of voters in favor of some kind of single-payer healthcare scheme. And the news was worse yet from a Kaiser Health tracking poll in June that indicated the single-payer idea has the support of 53% of Americans. That’s up by seven percentage points since 2009 when Obamacare was about to be signed into law. The bad idea of having the government give us things for free is hard to resist. And as the
rejected Universal Basic Income by a margin of 63%.
bad idea gets worse and worse, resisting it grows more and more difficult. Another bad idea that’s currently gaining ground is... Universal Basic Income The “UBI” figure most often named is $1,000 a month – to every citizen over 21 with few or no strings attached. This UBI would replace current federal welfare and retirement income benefits, either completely or mostly or partly – depending on which UBI advocate is advocating. (The UBI idea is a bit fuzzier than the single-payer idea, which is fuzzy enough.) A worrisome thing about UBI is
that the notion comes to us from both the political left and the political right. (There is some hope – opposition to the notion comes from both sides, too.)
$1k
American Consequences | 47
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