The so-called Green New Deal is only tangentially related to climate issues.
It’s best to think of it as the left’s wish list, and it includes a paid leave entitlement, government jobs, infrastructure boondoggles, and an expansion of the already bankrupt Social Security system.
But the most expensive item on the list is “Medicare for All,” which is a scheme concocted by Bernie Sanders to have the government pay for everything.
Would this be a good idea? In a column for Forbes, Sally Pipes of the Pacific Research Institute explains that government-run healthcare in the United Kingdom has some very unfriendly features.
Nearly a quarter of a million British patients have been waiting more than six months to receive planned medical treatment from the National Health Service, according to a recent report from the Royal College of Surgeons. More than 36,000 have been in treatment queues for nine months or more. …Consider how long it takes to get care at the emergency room in Britain. Government data show that hospitals in England only saw 84.2% of patients within four hours in February. …Wait times for cancer treatment — where timeliness can be a matter of life and death — are also far too lengthy. According to January NHS England data, almost 25% of cancer patients didn’t start treatment on time despite an urgent referral by their primary care doctor. …And keep in mind that “on time” for the NHS is already 62 days after referral.
If this sounds like the VA health care system, you’re right.
Both are government run. Both make people wait.
And both produce bad outcomes. Here’s some of the data from the British system.
Unsurprisingly, British cancer patients fare worse than those in the United States. Only 81% of breast cancer patients in the United Kingdom live at least five years after diagnosis, compared to 89% in the United States. Just 83% of patients in the United Kingdom live five years after a prostate cancer diagnosis, versus 97% here in America.
Just like I told Simon Hobbs on CNBC many years ago.
The best part of Sally’s column is that she explains how the flaws in the U.K. system are being copied by Bernie Sanders and other supporters.
Great Britain’s health crisis is the inevitable outcome of a system where government edicts, not supply and demand, determine where scarce resources are allocated. Yet some lawmakers are gunning to implement precisely such a system in the United States. The bulk of the Democratic Party’s field of presidential candidates — including Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren — co-sponsored Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2017 “Medicare for All” bill. That plan would abolish private insurance and put all Americans on a single government-run plan… Britons face long waits for poor care under their country’s single-payer system. That’s not the sort of healthcare model the American people are looking for.
The bottom line is that Medicare for All would further exacerbate the third-party payer problem that already plagues the health care system.
And that means ever-escalating demand, rising costs, and inefficiencies.
There are only two ways of dealing with the cost spiral. One option is huge tax increases, which would result in a massive, European-style tax burden on the lower-income and middle-class taxpayers.
Taxpayers in the U.K. endure higher burdens than their counterparts in America, But they also suffer from the second option for dealing with the cost spiral, which is rationing.
Some of the data was in Ms. Pipes’ column.
If you want more examples (and some horrifying examples), you can click stories from 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012.
[…] Yet there are nonetheless American politicians who want to copy this failed system. […]
[…] Yet there are nonetheless American politicians who want to copy this failed system. […]
[…] Yet there are nonetheless American politicians who want to copy this failed system. […]
[…] Yet there are nonetheless American politicians who want to copy this failed system. […]
[…] also think that it’s safe to say that they don’t want the left’s agenda (class warfare, Medicare for all, green new deal, etc) of bigger government and more […]
[…] also think that it’s safe to say that they don’t want the left’s agenda (class warfare, Medicare for all, green new deal, etc) of bigger government and more […]
[…] Our British friends are burdened with something akin to “Medicare for All.” […]
[…] Our British friends are burdened with something akin to “Medicare for All.” […]
[…] I wrote last month about a tax-and-spend proposal for single-payer healthcare in California (sort of a state version of “Medicare for All“). […]
[…] also think that it’s safe to say that they don’t want the left’s agenda (class warfare, Medicare for all, green new deal, etc) of bigger government and more […]
[…] “Medicare for All” Would Copy the Bad Features of the U.K.’s Government-Run System […]
[…] — “Medicare for All” Would Copy the Bad Features of the U.K.’s Government-Run System […]
[…] “Medicare for All” Would Copy the Bad Features of the U.K.’s Government-Run System […]
[…] also think that it’s safe to say that they don’t want the left’s agenda (class warfare, Medicare for all, green new deal, etc) of bigger government and more […]
[…] that it’s safe to say that they don’t want the left’s agenda (class warfare, Medicare for all, green new deal, etc) of bigger government and more […]
[…] bottom line is that we’ll wind up with single-payer, government-run healthcare, but politicians would be sneaking it in the back […]
[…] such, I don’t think Biden will push “Medicare for All” if he’s elected. But I fear he may support a “public option” that is less […]
[…] That being said, it may be worth noting that Germany and France have an approach that’s more akin to Obamacare while the system in Italy and the United Kingdom is more akin to Medicare for All. […]
[…] how a political party that can’t properly count 200,000 votes somehow can effectively run a healthcare system for 340 million […]
[…] for example, the radical Medicare-for-All scheme that is supported by “Crazy Bernie” and “Looney Liz.” That’s like […]
[…] I highlighted shortcomings of the NHS, they routinely got defensive, admitted that their system isn’t perfect, and then attacked […]
[…] address “sins of omission,” such as her inability to pare back the the country’s creaky government-run health care system (though she did some incremental reforms, such as internal […]
[…] former would dampen wages and hinder growth by penalizing saving and investment, while the latter would hasten America’s path to […]
[…] for instance, her new Medicare-for-All scheme. She got hammered for promising trillions of dollars of new goodies without specifying how it would […]
[…] As you can see, even if you combine all of the class-warfare taxes, they don’t come close to paying the $30 trillion price tag of Medicare for All. […]
[…] trade liberalization) or fighting off additional bad interventions (Green New Deal, protectionism, Medicare for All, class warfare […]
[…] of indoctrinating students at taxpayer expense, of disarming Americans, of union dominance, of worsening American healthcare, and […]
“British Court Orders Disabled Woman to Have Abortion Against Her Will”
BY DEBRA HEINE…
https://pjmedia.com/faith/british-court-orders-woman-to-have-abortion-against-her-will/
[…] Ultimately, this process may lead politicians to adopt something really crazy, such as “Medicare for All.” […]
[…] if you consider the creaky National Health Service, some sectors of the economy remain […]
Without competition, the people running the system have no incentive to perform well. Those with ethics will perform well, but the government-run education system has abandoned ethics leaving many without. So by its nature the green-new-deal cannot perform anywhere as well as the current system vaguely based on freedom of choice.
[…] Source: “Medicare for All” Would Copy the Bad Features of the U.K.’s Government-Run System […]
Medicare for All has little to do with medicine or health. It’s simply about power. Several states have tested the water for such a scheme and either been unable to pass enabling legislation, or cancel the program. These results are available to all and demonstrate the fallacy of the idea. Hence, knowing that the idea is impracticable, there must be another reason for wanting it. That reason is power; who holds it and who can administer not.
The left is ok with these realities. They just want to make sure no person gets better can than any other. Unless you are politically connected