A Virginia doctor has been arrested after he allegedly performed hysterectomies and tied fallopian tubes without the patient’s consent.
NBC News reported that Javaid Perwaiz, 69, was charged with “health care fraud and making false statements to federal investigators.” His case is in the hands of federal authorities.
NBC reported that Perwaiz was an obstetrician-gynecologist in Chesapeake, VA. More from NBC:
In one case, Perwaiz, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Chesapeake, told a woman she needed a hysterectomy after discovering the “imminent onset” of cancer, the documents said.
The patient objected and asked instead for a less invasive operation, in which only her ovaries were removed, the court papers said.
When the woman awoke from surgery, “she was shocked to discover Perwaiz performed a total abdominal hysterectomy.” The doctor cut the patient’s bladder in the process, causing sepsis and requiring a six-day hospital stay, investigators claimed.
When the woman later obtained her medical records, the surgery was described as “elective” and cancer was not mentioned, they said.
Another woman had gone to Perwaiz for post-menopausal bleeding. Perwaiz performed a hysterectomy on her and claimed in medical records that the woman suffered from “chronic pelvic pain, pressure and persistent cramping.”
The woman, according to NBC, told investigators she had none of those symptoms and that Perwaiz warned her that she could get cancer if she did not get the surgery.
Other patients claim Perwaiz “routinely used the ‘C-word’ [cancer] to scare patients into having surgery.”
In yet another horrific example, a woman who was helped by Perwaiz for an ectopic pregnancy later learned that she would not be able to naturally conceive a child because her fallopian tubes “were burnt down to the nubs, making natural conception impossible,” court documents reviewed by NBC showed.
Further, “Perwaiz lost his admitting privileges in 1982 at a hospital in nearby Portsmouth for performing unnecessary surgeries and poor clinical judgement,” NBC reported. He also “faced eight malpractice suits, including allegations he caused permanent injuries to three patients and life-threatening injuries to two others and failed to use techniques that were not invasive.”
Perwaiz’s name has since been removed from the websites of Bon Secours Maryview Medical Center and Chesapeake Regional Medical Center.
WTKR <a href="https://wtkr.com/2019/11/09/chesapeake-doctor-facing-charges-after-accused-of-performing-unnecessary-surgeries-on-unsuspecting-patients/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_us+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+U.S.%29">reported</a> that Perwaiz had been under investigation by the FBI since September 2018, after a hospital employee provided a tip that he was performing unnecessary surgeries on patients without their knowledge. Between January 2014 and August 2018, the outlet reported, “Perwaiz performed a surgical procedure on 40% of his Medicaid beneficiaries which amounted to 510 patients.” Of those patients, about 42% received two or more surgeries.
Perwaiz is currently in custody at Western Tidewater Regional Jail. His first court appearance is on November 14, the outlet reported.

Woman at the Gynecologist

Virginia Doctor Arrested After Allegedly Performing Hysterectomies Without Patients’ Consent

Crime

Health Care

As the 2020 election looms closer, health care has choked out virtually every other issue to stand alone as the primary focus of several top-tier candidates in the Democratic primary race.
While Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have each put forward a “Medicare for All” plan, candidates like South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Vice President Joe Biden have taken a softer position, proffering smaller ideas that would reportedly cost much less.
On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to speak with health care policy expert and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Scholar Joe Antos about “Medicare for All.”
In part one of this interview, which you can read <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/interview-part-i-health-care-policy-expert-joe-antos-breaks-down-the-dangers-of-medicare-for-all">here</a>, Antos breaks down the complexity of the current Medicare system, and discusses the damage that a “Medicare for All” system could cause, such as rationing of care, the raising of taxes on the middle class, provider flight, and innovation drain.
In part two below, Antos talks about a more “free market” approach to health care, understanding “universal” coverage, the way in which conservatives and Republican lawmakers should approach health care legislation, and the ultimate damage that a “Medicare for All” system could do.
<blockquote>DW: Is it realistic to think that someone could keep their doctor if we were to move to a “Medicare for All” system? A friend of mine from another country claims that she can see whatever doctor she wants under their plan, which is essentially a state-run plan.
ANTOS: That may be the case, as long as your doctor remains in practice. There’s a generational issue that may explain your friend’s comment. Young, healthy people typically do not have a doctor that they see regularly. In that sense, you could see any doctor you like, but you would not much care who it is. Older people or those with chronic conditions become attached to their doctors, so being able to keep their doctor is a more serious concern. One other point: older, more established doctors may be more likely to leave the active practice of medicine under a plan that sharply cuts their payments. In such a case, their patients would have no choice but to establish a relationship with a new doctor.
DW: Some people claim that the United States is a free market healthcare system, but that&#8217;s obviously not quite true. What are the differences between what we have and what a truly free market system would look like?
ANTOS: It is not very clear what people mean when they say “free market healthcare.” Our system is a mix of public and private coverage, with nearly everyone receiving a government subsidy. Private health insurance is subject to state and federal regulations, and providers are subject to licensure and other government regulations that are supposed to protect patients from unqualified providers – but also protect providers from competition. As a practical matter, government would have a role in a “free market” system, but it would be sharply reduced from what we see today.
One vision of a free market system would emphasize the role of consumers making their own decisions about their health care and bearing the full financial consequences of those decisions. Insurance would still play a financing role, with high-deductible plans accompanied by health savings accounts becoming even more common than we see today. To be workable, consumers and their physicians need information about treatment alternatives, provider performance, and cost. Both consumers and their doctors need strong financial incentives to select cost-effective care from efficient providers.
We’ve been edging our way toward a consumer-driven system for some time.
The latest Kaiser Family Foundation-HRET survey found that employer-sponsored coverage has shifted away from unmanaged fee-for-service plans. Between 2014 and 2019, enrollment in high-deductible plans with health savings accounts grew from 20% to 30% of the market. HMOs grew from 13% to 19% of total enrollment. Preferred provider organizations, which are fee-for-service plans with provider networks, shrank from 58% to 44% of total enrollment. That is a direct response by employers and employees to the high cost of unmanaged care.
However, we are sending consumers into the battle completely unarmed. It&#8217;s very hard to know what anything costs. It&#8217;s very hard to know what your insurance will pay for until after you have received the medical service. It&#8217;s very hard to judge how effective a treatment may be and whether there are alternatives that might be better. Patients depend on their physicians for good advice, and physicians often do not know whether a specialist is in your insurer’s network or what your plan will cover.
Lower back pain is a good example of the challenges we face as consumers, and how large employers are beginning to address them. In most cases, back surgery is the treatment of last resort. Patients with lower back pain need physical therapy, which in many cases will resolve the problem as long as the patient consistently follows the exercise regimen at home. Unnecessary spine surgeries are expensive, debilitate the patient for extended periods of time, and may not be effective.
Several large corporations, including Wal-Mart and Boeing, have contracted with well-known medical centers to evaluate their employees with lower back pain. Instead of an incentive to do more surgeries that is seen in unmanaged fee-for-service plans, these contracts reward appropriate care. The patients are assured that their care is being managed by high-quality providers, and the savings comes from reducing unnecessary use of high-cost treatment.
This example also highlights the critical role of the physician in guiding the patient’s decisions about the course of treatment. Health care is complex. To be successful, consumers need the guidance of their physicians, whose financial incentives should promote cost-effective care.
DW: Proponents of universal healthcare systems say that their primary goal is to get everyone covered because everyone should have good health care. What is the more optimal, free market-based plan, and how do we get there?
ANTOS: One of the things that advocates often get wrong is that health insurance does not guarantee appropriate care. The political focus for the last decade has been on expanding insurance coverage, with far less attention paid to what that coverage actually buys.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) relied on a mandate and penalties to force people to buy health insurance. Although the mandate was not effective, the idea was that the threat of a penalty would make younger, healthier people buy coverage that they would not otherwise purchase. Because premiums in the health insurance exchanges were high, coverage options were not attractive, and the financial penalty was small, exchange coverage attracted an older, sicker population.
A better approach would change the culture of health insurance. Instead of the ACA’s approach, which mandates consumers to buy expensive coverage, we could adopt automatic enrollment. Under that method, everyone would be automatically enrolled in a high-deductible health plan financed by restructuring existing federal health insurance subsidies. Consumers would not be charged a premium for this basic plan, but they could buy better coverage if they wished to. Anyone not wishing coverage could drop out, but few would take the time to do so. This approach makes insurance coverage the default without imposing unaffordable costs on consumers.
Under automatic enrollment, everyone would be eligible for a basic subsidy tied to their income level. Catastrophic expenses would be covered, but the benefit could be expanded to allow free or low-cost primary care. Covered California, which operates the ACA exchange in that state, requires all plans to offer such basic services, which has helped promote enrollment.
Implementing automatic enrollment would not be as difficult as skeptics think, but enrollment would take time to expand. Uninsured people who should be automatically enrolled can be identified through normal interactions with state and local government agencies. Enrolling a child in school, getting a driver’s license, voting, and other activities can be used to enroll the uninsured in this default system. Similarly, public health clinics and hospital emergency rooms can help enroll people who otherwise do not have coverage.
Automatic enrollment is not an instant solution, but it is also not disruptive. The measure of success is not how many people are newly covered by the default plan in any one year. Instead, the goal is to set up a process that will eventually cover everyone without locking them into unaffordable plans.
DW: Do you think Conservatives need to be more aggressive in offering their own solutions, instead of just pointing out the flaws in “Medicare for All” style systems?
ANTOS: Conservatives should offer their own proposals, but to be useful, the proposals need to be developed carefully. All too often, proposals focus on broad themes without the detailed specifications to implement those themes through legislation. It is important to work through the implications of one’s proposal to avoid overlooking problems that could make it technically and politically unworkable. The flight of Democrats from Elizabeth Warren’s plan demonstrates the importance of thinking through the details, and not ignoring the potential for a negative response from the public.
Republicans have too often reacted to Democratic initiatives rather than taking positive actions of their own. I think that partly explains the 2017 collapse of repeal and replace efforts in Congress. Well-developed conservative proposals can fill the policy void, but they must be realistic about how much any single piece of legislation can change the system. Realistic proposals should build on the best of what already exists, rather than pretending that we can start with a clean slate.
It&#8217;s very important to move away from simply reacting, and embrace a positive political approach. In my opinion, that means supporting the goal of making affordable coverage available to everyone. Affordability is not measured solely by the subsidies that help people pay for insurance, although subsidies targeted on those most in need are an essential part of any reform. We also have to improve the efficiency of the system to slow the growth of health spending, without rationing care and driving out innovation.
This takes hard work. The emphasis by liberals on expanding coverage is the easier message. Improving system performance is much more complicated, and that is what conservative proposals should focus on.
DW: What damage, aside from fiscally, could a “Medicare for All” system cause to patients, to doctors, etc?
ANTOS: I see a large waiting room filled with millions of people as doctors decide that another line of work makes more sense. Seriously, we will have growing access problems. The promise of free health care means that patients will have no financial reason to question whether a service is necessary. The reality of reduced provider payment rates means that physicians will have a strong incentive to try to make up their income losses by providing more services, especially those services that Medicare overpays. We could see increases in the volume of services that are not very effective, not very harmful to the patient, and more highly remunerative than more necessary care.
The broader effects on the economy could be very damaging. Warren has admitted that thousands of people now employed in the health industry would lose their jobs, but she claims that they will just shift to good jobs in other industries. That’s not so simple if you don’t have the skills needed for that next good job. If it exists. That’s the rub. Warren’s proposals to tax companies, individuals with high incomes, and wealth would create a serious drag on the economy. What she overlooks is that those taxes will take vast sums out of more productive sectors and pump it into the notoriously inefficient health sector. By and large, the wealth of this country goes into productive investments that create jobs, largely outside the health sector.
Access to care will become more difficult once it becomes “free.” The fiscal drag from “Medicare for All” will result in lost jobs and lower productivity, economy-wide. Business investments that would have been made in the U.S. will move to other countries with more favorable tax codes. It is not unreasonable to expect a recession that we might not recover from unless we come to our senses about our health system. Nearly one-fifth of our economy is in the health sector. That provides plenty of leverage for bad health policy to do serious damage.</blockquote>
I’d like to thank Joe Antos for speaking with me about such a critical issue. For more information, check out Antos’ profile on the American Enterprise Institute’s website <a href="https://www.aei.org/profile/joseph-antos/">here</a>, and follow him on <a href="https://twitter.com/joeantos?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">Twitter.</a>

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

INTERVIEW (Part II): Health Care Policy Expert Joe Antos On The Harsh Realities And Dangers Of ‘Medicare For All’

2020 Election

Bernie Sanders

Elizabeth Warren

Leftism

Medicare for All

As the 2020 election looms closer, health care has choked out virtually every other issue to stand alone as the primary focus of several top-tier candidates in the Democratic primary race.
While Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have each put forward a “Medicare for All” plan, candidates like South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Vice President Joe Biden have taken a softer position, proffering smaller ideas that would reportedly cost much less.
On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to speak with health care policy expert and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Scholar Joe Antos about “Medicare for All.”
In part one of this two-part interview, Antos breaks down the complexity of the current Medicare system, and discusses the damage that a “Medicare for All” system could cause, such as rationing of care, the raising of taxes on the middle class, provider flight, an innovation drain, and more.
<blockquote>DW: “Medicare for All” is said by many people, especially on the Left, to be popular among Americans. Is this true, and if so, why do you think that is?
ANTOS: Well, if it is popular, it&#8217;s because people don&#8217;t actually understand what the consequences would be for them personally. Opinion polls conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and other organizations ask for respondents’ reactions to “Medicare for All” without explaining what that could mean in terms of access to care or higher taxes. The public at this point is responding to a phrase that sounds good but might not be. Would “Medicare for All” actually be something that people would welcome? I think the answer is no – based on what we already know about Medicare.
The traditional Medicare program is a not a great insurance program. Medicare’s structure is extremely complex, unlike any other health insurance available today. Its benefits are not up to the level most middle-class people receive through their employer plans. The program is hard to navigate, and most beneficiaries rely on supplemental coverage to fill in Medicare’s gaps.
To give you a few examples. Most private insurance requires a single annual deductible – perhaps $1,000 or $2,000 for a family plan. Medicare has multiple deductibles. If you are admitted to a hospital, you pay a deductible, which is $1,364 this year. If you are admitted again more than 60 days later, you pay another $1,364 deductible. You are also liable for coinsurance starting at $341 a day if you are in the hospital for more than 60 days. There’s another deductible of $185 for physician and other services under Part B, and 20% coinsurance after you’ve satisfied the deductible.
That’s a sharp contrast with typical private coverage. If you were used to paying $20 for a visit to the doctor under your private insurance before you turned 65, Medicare’s high cost and arcane rules would come as a shock. Your out-of-pocket costs under Medicare are both expensive and unpredictable. There are arbitrary limits on what Medicare will cover and how long that coverage lasts, and those limitations vary by the type of medical service. It’s a very confusing program.
This is one of the reasons why Medicare Advantage (MA) has grown rapidly, especially over the last decade. About 35% of Medicare beneficiaries are in MA plans, which are all structured similarly to the kind of coverage you had when you were working. MA generally offers better benefits than traditional Medicare, and it&#8217;s in one easy-to-understand package. Traditional Medicare, by contrast, requires seniors to work their way through a maze of rules that frankly baffles experts, not just the average person.
Warren and Sanders only want parts of Medicare in “Medicare for All.” They would dispense with the success of private plans in containing program costs, and extend Medicare price controls to the entire health sector. They would add benefits and eliminate premiums and cost-sharing, opening the door to a massive increase in the use of services. Even most contenders for the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination know that won’t work.
The Kaiser Family Foundation polls demonstrate another important point about the public’s views. If asked how they feel about a “public option” or an “optional federal plan,” responses are much more favorable than for “Medicare for All.” The public likes the idea that there might be an alternative that might be better, but they don&#8217;t want to be forced into it because it might not be better. That says to me that the average person is leery about taking government promises at face value.
Anyone who has employer coverage knows what to expect. You may not be totally thrilled by it, but you know what it is. To be told that you will lose that coverage and be enrolled in a new, uncertain government plan is a disruption that many people would not welcome. Despite the enthusiasm from some on the Left, that&#8217;s not a positive political message.
DW: Sen. Elizabeth Warren&#8217;s plan is said to cost an additional $20.5 trillion over the first decade, and it would require major legislation to be passed, such as immigration reform. Sanders&#8217; plan would cost roughly $32 trillion, and he says middle class taxes would go up. Can you talk about that?
ANTOS: The Warren and Sanders plans are basically the same. Everyone would be enrolled in the government plan, and benefits would be expanded well beyond Medicare’s benefits to include dental, hearing, vision, and long-term care services. As a result, the bottom line cost would be about the same – about $32 trillion over the next decade. That’s the additional amount the federal government would have to pay to finance “Medicare for All” over the next decade.
Warren’s $20.5 trillion is lower only because it assumes some questionable sources of savings that total about $12 trillion. Her plan assumes that the federal government would receive the full amount state and local governments now pay for Medicaid and insurance for employees. Some spending would be reduced due to lower administrative costs. Health care providers would be paid substantially lower rates than they now receive from private insurers.
Warren’s plan would pay physicians and most other providers Medicare rates, which are about 40% below commercial rates. Recognizing that hospitals are a more potent political force, her plan offers hospitals 10% more than Medicare rates. That would have a devastating effect on many small and rural hospitals, many of which likely would be forced to close without additional subsidies. This proposal would directly challenge two of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington. That probably isn&#8217;t going to work out too well.
The remaining $20.5 trillion would be financed by a raft of new taxes. Nearly $9 trillion would be collected from employers to capture the amount they contribute to their employee’s health plans. The proposal also increases taxes on wealth, large corporations, financial transactions, and assumes increased tax revenue as a result of higher wages paid to workers who no longer have employer coverage. It is clear that the middle class will foot much of the bill for Warren’s proposal.
DW: If somehow the “Medicare for All” plans are paid for, is there a fear that talented surgeons, doctors, and even prospective surgeons and doctors who are planning to enter into medical school, might choose a different career path because those jobs won&#8217;t pay as much anymore?
ANTOS: That’s a legitimate concern, and we see this happening already. There is high demand for highly-trained physicians in roles that do not involve the direct delivery of care to patients. The hours are better, and the pay is good. That shift would certainly increase.
Delivering health care is not an easy job. It&#8217;s very time-consuming. There&#8217;s administrative hassle, which would not decrease under “Medicare for All.” At the end of the day, you&#8217;ve got to keep your business going, and now they&#8217;re going to cut your rates. For many providers, that would not make sense.
Young people would be less likely to go to medical school under such circumstances. Just as important, the health sector would be less attractive to investors who finance research that can lead to the next innovation in health care. This is a concern raised about pharmaceutical research, but it spans all of heath care. New diagnostic methods and new treatment approaches can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our health system. Those advances will be less forthcoming under “Medicare for All.”
DW: If there&#8217;s a type of doctor, say a therapist, that doesn&#8217;t accept insurance currently because they don&#8217;t make enough money from it, and they just accept check or cash payments, how would they be affected under a “Medicare for All” system? Would they be able to keep their practice going, or would they have to accept insurance?
ANTOS: That&#8217;s a difficult question to answer. Sanders is clearer about this than Warren. He flat out says that private health insurance would be banned by law. The only services that could be offered by private providers would be ones not covered by “Medicare for All.” That would restrict private health care to a narrow range of services, such as elective cosmetic surgery, which is generally not covered by insurance now. The market for such limited services is very small.
The bread and butter of health care would be delivered under the government plan, without a private sector alternative. It might be possible for some providers to establish concierge practices that accept only cash customers, but few people would be able to afford this. It seems likely that proponents of “Medicare for All” would try to outlaw such work-arounds, arguing that everyone should access health services on the same terms with no exceptions.
DW: What the proponents of “Medicare for All” systems continuously say is, &#8220;Yes, you may pay more in taxes, but the overall cost will go down.&#8221; What do you say to that?
ANTOS: Some people will gain financially, some will lose. Where you come out depends on many factors, including your income, the generosity of your previous coverage, and your health status. Warren says she will tax the rich without increasing taxes on the middle class. That doesn&#8217;t mean the middle class won&#8217;t pay more in taxes. They certainly will. There just isn&#8217;t enough money from taxes on high-income people and wealth to finance the kind of expansions they&#8217;re talking about.
For the middle class, it is a close call. If you are likely to use expensive medical services and your previous coverage required significant out-of-pocket payments, you are more likely to save money looking narrowly at health costs. However, even in that case, you could end up with higher total costs when taxes are taken into account. The amount you currently contribute to your employer premium would become taxable income, and the employer tax is actually a tax on part of your total compensation – so you pay that as well.
A major goal of both proposals is income redistribution through the health system. Low-income people who are not eligible for Medicaid would have their medical bills paid. High-income people would see their taxes increase. But everyone would face longer waiting lines to access medical services. We can look to Canada to see that.
We&#8217;re also going to lose access to services that simply won&#8217;t be there because we will not have put the investment in, and nobody on the private side will take the risk.
DW: I was talking to a friend of mine from Canada who said that her mother had a ligament injury in her knee, and she had to wait six months to get an MRI. Despite the injury being terribly painful, it wasn&#8217;t life threatening, so they pushed her down the waiting list. On the other side of that, I have friends from Italy, from Canada, from the U.K. who have told me that they love their medical systems.
ANTOS: People&#8217;s attitudes about their health system depend on their expectations and, for many, whether they had a good experience the last time they needed care. Americans have high expectations. The British may be less demanding, partly because Britain is a less wealthy country and people may be more willing to wait for services. Opinions in other countries have no bearing on how a government health system would be viewed here.
The example of a torn ligament is revealing. If you are in pain and are told to wait for treatment, you won’t be happy regardless of your nationality.
Sally Pipes, the president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute in California, is Canadian. She has pointed out that a dog would have more rapid access to an MRI than a human Canadian. The reason is that veterinary care is not part of the Canadian health system, and the private market responds to consumer demand. Moreover, since veterinary care is not subsidized by the government and insurance is not involved, prices are lower – reflecting what pet owners are willing to pay. Fido does not wait in line even though his owner does.</blockquote>
In part two of this interview, which will be released on Sunday, Antos talks about a more “free market” approach to health care, understanding “universal” coverage, the way in which conservatives and Republican lawmakers should approach health care legislation, the ultimate damage that a “Medicare for All” system could do, and more.

Bernie Sanders &#038; Elizabeth Warren.

INTERVIEW (Part I): Health Care Policy Expert Joe Antos Breaks Down The Dangers Of ‘Medicare For All’

The following is satirical.
Elizabeth Warren has released details of her health care plan. The plan, entitled “Pay Now, Die Later,” is estimated to cost $56 billion in added expenses, but Warren says that will be paid for with a tax on billionaires as soon as they return from their tax-free retreats in the Cayman Islands.
Warren says not a single penny of the plan will be paid for by the middle class because we’re all in this together and no one will be left behind and it’s time to make a difference and, yeah, the middle class will basically be taxed out of existence paying for the whole thing.
On the positive side, Warren says that, under her plan, instead of being ripped off by private insurance companies who take your money and then fail to pay when catastrophic illness strikes, you’ll be ripped off by the United States Government who’ll take your money and then turn every hospital into a cross between the VA and the DMV so that you wait in line so long you finally beg to die, whereupon they kill you and congratulate themselves on their fast, efficient service. After all, Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.
What’s more, the Warren plan will increase the efficiency of doctors by bathing them in magic efficiency dust which will cause them to forget they have no reason to be more efficient because the government will pay them the same thing no matter what. Plus, everyone will be healthier because of public service announcements telling them not to eat eggs until we find out eggs are good for you when there will be announcements telling you to eat eggs, but too late, since you’ve already died from too few eggs, thus saving government money and providing a much-needed tax break to the middle class who did I mention will be paying for the whole thing.
When asked what will happen to the millions of people currently employed in the insurance industry, Warren said none of them would suffer, but would instead be put painlessly to sleep like everyone else on government health care.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/klavan-nyt-columnist-calls-collapse-of-american-christianty-overstated-hes-got-a-point">KLAVAN: NYT Columnist Calls ‘Collapse’ Of American Christianity ‘Overstated.’ He’s Got A Point.</a>

Elizabeth Warren Delights Democrats With Hilarious New Health Plan [Satire]

Satire

With the rollout of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) health care plan on Friday, a “Medicare for All” style system has now been officially proposed by two of the most popular Democratic presidential candidates.
Multiple analyses have concluded that Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) “Medicare for All” plan would cost as much as <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/465894-new-study-full-scale-medicare-for-all-costs-32-trillion-over-10-years">$32 trillion</a> over a decade. Warren claims her plan would require approximately <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/11/01/775339519/heres-how-warren-finds-20-5-trillion-to-pay-for-medicare-for-all">$20.5 trillion</a> in “new” federal spending.
Many progressive commentators and politicians claim that “Medicare for All,” or its more general counterpart, “Universal coverage,” is popular among voters. Poll after poll appear to suggest the same thing – except upon closer inspection, that’s not quite the case.
In February, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/poll-only-13-americans-want-government-run-frank-camp">The Hill-HarrisX</a> released a survey that asked respondents the following question about health care: “Which of the following comes closest to your views?”
<ul>
<li>15% of respondents said that “the government should remove itself from paying for all health care.”</li>
<li>14% said “the current health care system should be kept as is.”</li>
<li>26% said “any citizen should be able to sign up for Medicare/Medicaid regardless of age or income while those with private plans could keep their existing insurance.”</li>
<li>32% said “Medicare/Medicaid should be expanded to cover all citizens regardless of age or income but people should be able to purchase private supplemental plans.”</li>
<li>13% said “Medicare/Medicaid should be expanded to cover all citizens regardless of age or income and private health plans should be abolished.”</li>
</ul>
A July poll from <a href="http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NPR_PBS-NewsHour_Marist-Poll_USA-NOS-and-Tables_1907190926.pdf#page=3">NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist</a> asked respondents if “Medicare for all, that is a national health insurance program for all Americans that replaces private health insurance,” was a “good idea” or a “bad idea.” 41% said it was a “good idea,” while 54% said it was a “bad idea.”
An August survey by <a href="https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_US_082619/">Monmouth University</a> asked: “Which of the following comes closest to how you would like to see health care handled:  A) Get rid of all private insurance coverage in favor of having everyone on a single public plan like Medicare for All, B) Allow people to either opt into Medicare or keep their private coverage &#8230; or D) Keep the health insurance system basically as it is?”
Only 22% selected A, while 53% selected B, and 11% selected D.
In September, <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6426498-19357-NBCWSJ-September-Registered-Voter-Poll-Final.html">NBC News/Wall Street Journal</a> released a survey in which respondents were asked if they supported a Medicare for All-style system in which “private health insurance would be eliminated.” 22% said they “strongly support” such a system, 19% said they “somewhat support,” while 44% said they “strongly oppose,” and 12% said they “somewhat oppose.” That’s a combined 41% supporting such a system, and 56% opposing it.
In October, the <a href="https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer-national-health-plans-and-expanding-access-to-medicare-coverage/">Kaiser Family Foundation</a> (KFF) asked respondents: “Would you favor or oppose a national Medicare-for-all plan if you heard that it would &#8230; eliminate private health insurance companies?” While 37% said they would favor such a plan, 58% said they would oppose it.
What these surveys demonstrate is that once the glossy buzzphrase of “Medicare for All” is wiped away, and the American people are faced with the elimination of private insurance, the majority react negatively. Despite this fact, Sen. Sanders and Sen. Warren, two of the leading Democratic candidates for president, have put out plans that would indeed eliminate private insurance.

Sanders and Warren.

POLL DATA: Majorities Oppose ‘Medicare For All’ If It Eliminates ‘Private Health Insurance’

About <a href="https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/employment/health-medical-insurance-united-states">600,000 people</a> work in the health and medical insurance industry in the United States, according to market research firm IBIS World. Under Medicare-for-All, these people and many others would likely lose their jobs, since private insurance would be abolished.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who recently released her <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/elizabeth-warrens-plan-to-fund-medicare-for-all-is-a-complete-fantasy">dubious plan</a> to fund Medicare-for-All, was recently asked what would happen to the hundreds of thousands of people who would lose their jobs under her single-payer health care plan.
&#8220;No one gets left behind,” Warren responded. “Some of the people currently working in health insurance will work in other parts of insurance. In life insurance, in auto insurance, in car insurance. Some will work for Medicaid.&#8221;
“And there is a five-year transition support for everyone,” she continued. “Because, what this is about is how we strengthen America’s middle class and how we make sure, in transitions, no one gets left behind. It’s right there in the plan and it’s fully paid for.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Q: Where do those who work in health insurance go when private insurance is eliminated?
Sen. Warren: &#8220;No one gets left behind. Some of the people currently working in health insurance will work in other parts of insurance. In life insurance, in auto insurance, in car insurance.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/KGJ4Eg9VKR">pic.twitter.com/KGJ4Eg9VKR</a>
— The Hill (@thehill) <a href="https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1190441142069817344?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 2, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
This sounds an awful lot like Warren is claiming ‘If you like your job, you can keep your job.” It also sounds like the much criticized “learn to code,” a skill journalists suggested displaced coal workers learn but then claimed the phrase was harmful when suggested back to them.
It is not so easy, even with the five-year transition plan to move one entire industry (health insurance) into another (car or life insurance). There are not 600,000-plus job openings in the other insurance industries to accommodate those people, and that’s not even factoring in where the jobs might be if they were available. We’re talking about thousands upon thousands of people potentially needing to move in order to transition into another type of insurance. That’s a ton of people whose lives will be uprooted due to Warren’s plan.
Luckily, the probability of Warren actually getting her Medicare-for-All plan passed is close to zero. She has claimed that her plan won’t raise taxes on the middle class, which is impossible and something her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has admitted would be necessary. Warren’s plan to fund her single-payer proposal hinges in part on immigration reform, something Presidents Donald Trump Barack Obama, and George W. Bush could not achieve.
Her funding plan would also end up costing the middle class, as the numerous taxes she plans to place on employers would inevitably be passed on to employees.
Warren also relies on phantom funding to raise $2.3 trillion toward paying the $52 trillion price tag on Medicare-for-All. She claims she can raise $2.3 trillion from better IRS enforcement, yet the Congressional Budget Office has previously stated improved enforcement would only bring in a net $35 billion.
Warren <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-elizabeth-warren-admits-medicare-for-all-would-cause-tremendous-loss-of-jobs">had admitted</a> previously that her health care plan could cost upwards of 2 million jobs, but dismissed those losses by discussing health care costs.
“I think this is part of the cost issue and should be part of a cost plan,” she said at a recent forum in New Hampshire. “Although I do recognize on this what we’re talking about, and that is in effect how much of our health care dollars have not gone to health care, how many of those dollars have been pulled out in other directions.”

Elizabeth Warren Asked What Will Happen To Health Insurance Workers Under Medicare-For-All, Claims They’ll Work In Car Insurance

Medicare

The modern-day Democratic Party is, on any number of issues, simply <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-democratic-party-has-become-parody-itself-josh-hammer">beyond parody</a>. The far-left tail that is the AOC-led &#8220;Squad&#8221; has long come to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-aocs-squad-will-destroy-democrats-2020-josh-hammer">wag the dog</a> that is the institutional party apparatus, and perhaps nowhere is this dynamic more obvious than in the intersection of economics and mathematics that sentient human beings have hitherto referred to as &#8220;sanity.&#8221;
In the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders (<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-bernie-sanders-entire-worldview-grotesquely-josh-hammer">Communist</a> &#8211; VT) was notable for proposing sundry pie-in-the-sky socialistic nostrums that far outflanked eventual nominee Hillary Clinton on the hard left. In the clown car pile-up that is the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Sanders has once again outdone himself. As economic policy expert Brian Riedl recently broke down for <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/bernie-sanders-expensive-spending-proposals">City Journal</a>, Sanders&#8217; &#8220;current plans would cost as much as $97.5 trillion over the next decade,&#8221; and government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product would rise to an astonishing 70% — or three and a half times the 20% that has been the frequent post-World War II <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S">American norm</a>. The single priciest component of Sanders&#8217; hammer-and-sickle agenda, as the erstwhile Soviet Union honeymooner has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNP-AQlVZKM">conceded</a>, is his bankrupting &#8220;Medicare for All&#8221; plan — to the tune of $30–$40 trillion over a ten-year timeframe.
What is simply remarkable is that Sanders&#8217; &#8220;Medicare for All&#8221; price tag now looks positively conservative compared to the newly unveiled plan of 2020 Democratic presidential primary rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). As The Daily Wire&#8217;s Ashe Schow <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/elizabeth-warrens-plan-to-fund-medicare-for-all-is-a-complete-fantasy">noted</a> earlier today, Warren&#8217;s new &#8220;Medicare for All&#8221; proposal &#8220;would cost $52 trillion over 10 years.&#8221; Proving even more thoroughly that the quixotic Democratic Party mind lies somewhere between the idyllic river of dragon dreams and the paradisal valley of unicorn farts, Warren doubled down on the disingenuous mathematical impossibility that she peddled ad nauseam at the last presidential primary debate and informed us gullible plebeians that her plan will somehow <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/11/01/775335150/read-elizabeth-warrens-plan-to-pay-for-medicare-for-all">not result in middle class tax hikes</a>.
Hmmmm.
As Riedl has <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/8/7/17658574/democratic-socialism-cost-medicare-college-sanders-deficits-taxes">previously</a> <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-deficits-on-the-rise-and-not-because-of-tax-cuts-democrats-will-make-it-worse">demonstrated</a>, there is simply no world in which this exorbitant level of federal spending can be sustained. It is a complete and utter mathematical impossibility. Heck, we as a nation cannot even fiscally sustain our own previously pledged commitments to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-republicans-need-be-adults-and-talk-about-josh-hammer">bankrupting entitlement programs</a>!
But sure, what&#8217;s another $52 trillion in health care going to do, once we&#8217;re all already heading straight for a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/business/international/greece-debt-crisis-euro.html">Greece-style</a> sovereign debt abyss? At this point, the entirety of both the Democratic Party and &#8220;progressive&#8221; economic firmament seem to be unanimously in thrall to the <a href="https://economics21.org/modern-monetary-theory-rational-inflation">economically illiterate</a> fiction that is co-called &#8220;modern monetary theory&#8221; (MMT) — the nonsensical notion, as <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/modern-monetary-theory-mmt-4588060">explained</a> by Investopedia, that governments that print their own currency &#8220;do not need taxes or borrowing for spending&#8221; because &#8220;they can print as much as they need and are the monopoly issuers of the currency.&#8221; Intellectually honest Democrats would publicly proclaim their fealty to the MMT cabal, in lieu of constantly equivocating when pressed about how they might possibly fund their fiscally ruinous and un-fundable schemes.
Sober-minded citizens have already seen the 2020 Democrats lurch to the far left on all sorts of bread-and-butter cultural and civilizational issues — from border security to religion to abortion to transgenderism. But on perhaps no issue is this crop of hucksters more transparently nutty than on their various plans for perhaps the most rudimentary political issue of all: Government spending.

October Democratic primary debate

HAMMER: The Democratic Presidential Primary Is A Race To The Fiscally Illiterate Bottom

Democratic Party

Economy

Obamacare

Progressivism

She might as well have said she’d pay for the plan with leprechaun gold.
After being asked repeatedly how she would fund her Medicare for All plan, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) finally released the details, and they are as impossible as one can imagine.
For starters, Warren’s 2020 campaign claims her plan to fund single-payer health care in America would not raise taxes on the middle class, something her opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has admitted would be necessary.
Warren’s plan would cost $52 trillion over 10 years, but remember, there is no sunset for the single-payer program. It would cost more than $5 trillion a year. For comparison, the federal government spent an already alarming $4.11 trillion in fiscal year 2018, up from $3.99 trillion in fiscal year 2017.
“Medicare for All puts all health care on the government’s books. But Medicare for All is about the same price as our current path — and cheaper over time,” said Warren, whose plan would cost $52 trillion over the next 10 years. “That means the debate isn’t really about whether the United States should pay more or less. It’s about who should pay.”
Warren says she can add that amount to the economy without crushing the middle class, by predictable cuts to military spending and tax hikes on the wealthy, the latter of which is likely unconstitutional.
Many of Warren’s pay-fors highlight the improbability of her plan. Politico’s chief Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, noted that Warren has rolled in immigration reform as a way to fund Medicare-for-All.
“To get a sense of how enormously difficult it is to raise the money to pay for Medicare for All, look at this section of the Warren proposal where she says that comprehensive immigration reform, a Herculean legislative feat that Bush and Obama failed at, will help pay for M4A,” Lizza <a href="https://twitter.com/RyanLizza/status/1190256613199941632">tweeted</a>.
The immigration reform portion of Warren’s plan claims that providing a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants and expanding legal immigration would increase federal revenue to fund her plan. “Based on [the Congressional Budget Office’s] analysis of the 2013 comprehensive immigration reform bill, experts project that immigration reform would generate an additional $400 billion in direct federal revenue.”
But as Lizza pointed out, neither of the past two presidents have been able to achieve immigration reform, and it is unlikely Trump will be able to do the same. Democrats’ immigration plans &#8212; the parts granting citizenship to those who came here illegally or providing free government services for illegal immigrants &#8212; would not get much, if any, Republican support. It is highly unlikely that Warren would have veto-proof majorities in the congress to pass her proposal should she be elected president.
Another part of Warren’s funding plan suggests that properly collecting taxes “would generate $2.3 trillion in additional federal revenue without requiring the imposition of any new taxes” (emphasis added). The CBO, however, <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-06/54667-budgetoptions-2.pdf">has determined</a> that better enforcement from the IRS would raise just $55 billion over 10 years, but the necessary costs of funding the better enforcement would cost $20 billion, meaning just $35 billion would be raised. That’s far from Warren’s claims of $2.3 trillion.
Warren’s plan would also cut payments to doctors. This could not occur in a vacuum. Those cuts would be passed on to the patients, meaning that Warren’s claims that people would save money from her plan, based on current health care prices, is likely untrue.
“The most sweeping and controversial piece of her additions to Sanders’ bill is a pledge to pay most physicians current Medicare rates — which are much lower than private insurance rates but higher than Medicaid — and to pay hospitals slightly above Medicare rates. She argues that doctors will save money overall because they’ll be able to dedicate the hours they currently spend billing a swath of interlocking private and public insurance plans to providing care,” Politico <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/01/elizabeth-warren-medicare-for-all-plan-063775">reported</a>. “But medical providers who are <a href="https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/story/2019/05/25/medicare-for-all-health-1436763">already mobilizing</a> against Medicare for All are likely to take this as a declaration of war.”
In addition, Warren’s plan proposes increased taxes on employers, including new Medicare taxes her campaign says will raise nearly $9 trillion over the next 10 years to pay for her single-payer plan. The campaign said that if they fail to reach the targeted revenue, they could impose a “Supplemental Employer Medicare Contribution” on corporations with “extremely high executive compensation and stock buyback rates.” This “employer tax,” would likely be passed on to the workers in decreased wages.
Warren may be able to get away with saying she, unlike Sanders, won’t impose any new implicit taxes on the middle class, her plan will require additional funds from the middle class as taxes, fees, and payment reductions are passed on to the workers.
This doesn’t even take into account the favoritism Warren shows in her plan to unionized companies. Warren’s plan proposes that companies with collective bargaining agreements will pay less than non-unionized companies. This sort of favoritism will likely lead to consequences Warren either doesn’t foresee or refuses to acknowledge.
In response to Warren&#8217;s plan, Kate Bedingfield, communications director for former Vice President Joe Biden, <a href="https://twitter.com/ZekeJMiller/status/1190282040509452289">told</a> Associate Press White House reporter Zeke Miller that &#8220;The mathematical gymnastics in this plan are all geared towards hiding a simple truth from voters: it&#8217;s impossible to pay for Medicare for All without middle class tax increases&#8221;
The bottom line is that Warren’s fantasy accounting is unrealistic and would likely never be achieved, emphasizing the impossibility of the Left’s Medicare for All dream.

Elizabeth Warren’s Plan To Fund Medicare For All Is A Complete Fantasy

Even as Democrats inveigh against President Trump for his alleged norm-shattering and contempt for the rule of law, their health care plans show a growing embrace of authoritarianism. For instance, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) recently <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2019-09-25/schiff-trumps-comments-a-classic-mafia-like-shakedown" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2019-09-25/schiff-trumps-comments-a-classic-mafia-like-shakedown&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1572027551149000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGwkxR4Q6ZOFaNqd4M8yJdUm134cA">dubbed</a> the president’s July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “a classic mafia-like shakedown.” He knows of which he speaks, because the Democratic Party agenda on health care now includes threats to destroy any entities failing to comply with government-dictated price controls.
The latest evidence comes from Colorado, where several government agencies recently submitted a <a href="https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/HB19-1004%20Draft%20Report%20Colorado%20State%20Coverage%20Option%20and%20Appendix.pdf" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/HB19-1004%2520Draft%2520Report%2520Colorado%2520State%2520Coverage%2520Option%2520and%2520Appendix.pdf&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1572027551149000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFDkt31ZlobGZ-HQwefFU-NC7beBQ">draft report</a> regarding the creation of a “state option” for health insurance. The plan would not create a state-run health insurer; instead, it would see agencies dragooning private sector firms to comply with government diktats.
The plan would “require insurance carriers that offer plans in a major market,” whether individual, small group, or large group, “to offer the state option as well.” In these state-mandated plans that insurers must offer, carriers would have to abide by stricter controls on their administrative costs — in the form of medical loss ratio requirements — than those dictated by Obamacare.
For medical providers, the Colorado plan would use “payment benchmarks” to cap reimbursement amounts for doctors and hospitals. And if hospitals decline to accept these government-imposed price controls, the report ominously says that “the state may implement measures to ensure health systems participate.”
In comments to reporters, Colorado officials made clear their intent to coerce providers into this price-controlled system. Insurance Commissioner Michael Conway <a href="https://coloradosun.com/2019/10/09/colorado-health-public-option-hospitals/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://coloradosun.com/2019/10/09/colorado-health-public-option-hospitals/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1572027551149000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEdfFeIqjhxySRoTgjO7RycSEOHhA">admitted</a> that “[i]f our hospital systems don’t participate, this won’t work &#8230; [w]e can’t allow that to happen.” The head of Colorado’s Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, Kim Bimestefer, <a href="https://coloradosun.com/2019/10/07/colorado-public-health-insurance-option-proposal/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://coloradosun.com/2019/10/07/colorado-public-health-insurance-option-proposal/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1572027551149000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGvUest7eeWAQmR2Zl20j5M7mzlAw">said</a> that “if we feel that the hospitals are not going to participate, we will require their participation.”
State officials did not elaborate on the mechanisms they would use to compel participation in the state option. But they could attempt to require hospitals and insurers to participate in the new plan to maintain their license to operate in Colorado — a likely unconstitutional condition of licensure.
In threatening this level of coercion — agree to price controls, or we’ll shut down your business — Colorado Gov. Jared Polis imitated his fellow Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi’s proposed drug pricing bill, up for a vote in the House as soon as next month, would impose excise taxes of up to 95% of a drug’s sale price if companies refuse to “negotiate” with the federal government.
In its <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-10/hr3ltr.pdf" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-10/hr3ltr.pdf&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1572027551149000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHtCPW1KJ1eddfASQamnbb-cBFA-g">analysis</a> of Pelosi’s legislation, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) noted that, because drug makers could not deduct the 95% excise tax for income tax purposes, “the combination of income taxes and excise taxes on the sales could cause the drug manufacturer to lose money if the drug was sold in the United States.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, CBO concluded that the excise tax would not generate “any significant increase in revenues,” as “manufacturers would either participate in the negotiating process” — because they have no effective alternative — “or pull a particular drug out of the U.S. market entirely.”
CBO also noted, in a classic bit of understatement, that Pelosi’s bill “could result in litigation,” for threatening losses on any company that dares defy the government’s offer of “negotiation.” But the Left seems uninterested in abiding by limits on government power — or the consistency of its own arguments. As I <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/dems-new-plan-would-ban-private-medicine-11557688457" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/articles/dems-new-plan-would-ban-private-medicine-11557688457&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1572027551149000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFNRhLOlmEwRWTbqkNbJt_yGEVBpw">noted this spring</a>, other proposed legislation in Congress would abolish the private health care market. Less than one decade after forcing all Americans to buy a product for the first time ever, in the form of Obamacare’s insurance mandate, liberals now want to prohibit all Americans from purchasing care directly from their doctors.
These recent proposals continue a virulent strain of authoritarianism that has permeated progressivism’s entire history. Franklin Roosevelt threatened to invoke emergency powers during his first inaugural address, and Rahm Emanuel infamously <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mzcbXi1Tkk" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3D_mzcbXi1Tkk&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1572027551149000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEqUQZt1ngA3w0MxGoRCLRx9FlQDQ">said</a> during the Great Recession that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Make no mistake: The health care system needs patient-centered reform. But the true crisis comes from the progressives who would utilize blunt government force to seize control of one-fifth of the nation’s economy.
&nbsp;
Mr. Jacobs is Founder and CEO of Juniper Research Group, and author of the book The Case Against Single Payer. He is on Twitter: <a href="http://www.twitter.com/chrisjacobsHC" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.twitter.com/chrisjacobsHC&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1572027551149000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH6oeMTNLARnFthxB33FurVWA3XYw">@chrisjacobsHC</a>.

Surgeons operating patient for breast implant

JACOBS: The Left’s Health Care Vision Is A Prescription For Brute Government Force

Health

Following strong Tuesday night performances, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, have come away from the debate stage with even stronger financial viability. 
On Wednesday, Lis Smith, a senior advisor to Pete Buttigieg, announced on Twitter the Buttigieg campaign had raised $1 million in the aftermath of the first debate. The campaign indicated that the donations had come from “tens of thousands of donors.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">We are officially over $1M raised in the past 24 hours from tens of thousands of donors <a href="https://t.co/ceJDEzi8AF">https://t.co/ceJDEzi8AF</a>
— Lis Smith (@Lis_Smith) <a href="https://twitter.com/Lis_Smith/status/1184530421733822471?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 16, 2019</a></blockquote>
Klobuchar also announced on Twitter that she raised $1.1 million in the 24 hours after the debate. The fundraising haul is the largest amount Klobuchar has received in any single day while running for president, and is nearly 20% of the amount she raised in the entire third quarter of 2019.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
WE DID IT! Together we raised $1.1M in the 24 hours since the debate! This couldn&#8217;t have happened without you and your support. Let&#8217;s not stop! Keep the momentum going and donate today! <a href="https://t.co/iVg91M9DTq">https://t.co/iVg91M9DTq</a>
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) <a href="https://twitter.com/amyklobuchar/status/1184665450292154371?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 17, 2019</a></blockquote>
During the debate, Klobuchar attacked Warren for supporting “Medicare For All,” drawing attention to the fact that Warren has yet to explain how she would pay for single-payer health care for everybody. 
“At least Bernie’s being honest here and saying how he’s gonna pay for this, and that taxes are going to go up,” Klobuchar told Warren, as reported by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/elections/100000006761445/klobuchar-warren-health-care.html">The New York Times</a>. “We owe it to the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice.”
After Warren deflected from Klobuchar’s criticism, Klobuchar rebutted, proclaiming that “the difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something that you can actually get done.”
A new study released by the <a href="https://www.urban.org/research/publication/incremental-comprehensive-health-reform-how-various-reform-options-compare-coverage-and-costs">Urban Institute</a>, a liberal think tank, showed that a plan similar to “Medicare for All” would increase federal health care spending by around $32.5 trillion dollars over the next decade.
As the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-moderate-2020-democrats-rip-elizabeth-warren-over-medicare-for-all-you-are-making-republican-talking-points">Daily Wire</a> previously reported, Buttigieg attacked Warren for not being honest about how “Medicare for All” would be funded.
“Look, this is why people here in the midwest are so frustrated with Washington in general and Capitol Hill in particular,” Buttigieg told Warren during the debate. “Your signature, senator, is to have a plan for everything — except this. No plan has been laid out to explain how a multi-trillion dollar hole in this ‘Medicare for All’ plan that Senator Warren is putting forward is supposed to get filled in.”
In another startling debate moment, Buttigieg sparred with Beto O’Rourke after the former congressman suggested that Democrats were cowering on the issue of gun confiscation. 
“The problem isn’t the polls, the problem is the policy. And I don’t need lessons from you on courage, political or personal,” Buttigieg told O’Rourke on the debate stage Tuesday, as reported by <a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/10/15/pete-buttigieg-beto-orourke-gun-violence-2020-democratic-presidential-debate-cnn-nyt-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/cnn-new-york-times-democratic-debate/">CNN</a>. “Everyone on this stage is determined to get something done. Everyone on this stage recognizes — or at least I thought we did — the problem is not other Democrats who don’t agree with your particular idea of how to handle this.” 
However, Buttigieg was not moderate on the issue, as he proceeded to place blame on the NRA and “their enablers in congress.”
According to <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html">RealClearPolitics</a>, Buttigieg is currently polling in fourth behind Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Klobuchar, who has failed to gain as much traction, is polling in eighth behind businessman Andrew Yang.

Amy Klobuchar

Candidates Who Attacked Warren Over &#8216;Medicare For All&#8217; Draw Massive Fundraising Boost

Pete Buttigieg

Parents in Canada have <a href="https://abc13.com/5599418/?ex_cid=TA_KTRK_TW&amp;utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&amp;utm_content=5d9bc399165af60001530d12&amp;utm_medium=trueAnthem&amp;utm_source=twitter">filed</a> a class action lawsuit against Epic Games, the company that made the popular video game Fortnite. The distraught plaintiffs accuse the devious minds behind Fortnite of intentionally creating it to be &#8220;as addictive as possible.&#8221; This addiction has destroyed their children&#8217;s lives, they say.
The lawsuit says that one of the supposedly addicted children has played around 1,800 Fortnite matches in seven months, while the other has logged about 7,000 matches and often stays up playing until the early morning hours. Google tells me that a Fortnite match typically takes about 20 minutes. If this is a good estimate, then these children have spent 600 hours and more than 2,000 hours, respectively, playing the game.
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the alleged scourge of video game addiction. Just this week it was announced that children in the UK will receive <a href="https://inews.co.uk/news/technology/video-game-addiction-skype-treatment-appointments-nhs-children-648378">treatment</a> for their addictions through the National Health Service. Kids who suffer from this affliction can meet with psychologists and psychiatrists at the newly minted Centre for Internet and Gaming Disorders. Kids in our country, too, seem to be coming down with this mysterious disorder at an alarming rate. Fortnite, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-27/fortnite-addiction-prompts-parents-to-turn-to-video-game-rehab">according</a> to Bloomberg News, is even &#8220;forcing kids into video game rehab.&#8221;
Most kids hopefully aren&#8217;t putting 2,000 hours a year into their video game habit &#8212; excuse me, &#8220;addiction&#8221; &#8212; but they are averaging over <a href="https://www.kait8.com/story/38433832/study-kids-play-15-hours-of-video-games-per-week/">two hours a day</a>, according to some studies. That&#8217;s a significant chunk of time when you consider that it is just an average &#8212; many kids are playing for significantly more time than that &#8212; and it doesn&#8217;t include all of the other time spent on other forms of media. But does it justify treating video games as an addiction? And who exactly should we be blaming for the problem? Are video game companies guilty of using some sort of voodoo to hypnotize kids and compel them to keep playing, or is there a more mundane and localized explanation?
On the first question, as professors of psychology Christopher J. Ferguson and Patrick Markey <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/opinion/sunday/video-games-arent-addictive.html">pointed out</a> in a recent op-ed, video games are not &#8220;in any meaningful sense&#8221; addictive. Yes, the pleasure of playing video games involves the same areas of the brain that drug use activates, but the same can be said for just about every enjoyable activity. If this simple neurological fact justifies the comparison between Fortnite and cocaine (a comparison <a href="https://www.newser.com/story/281465/lawsuit-fortnite-designed-to-be-as-addictive-as-cocaine.html">made</a> in the Fortnite lawsuit), then you could also argue that reading a book is tantamount to using heroine and going for a jog is like smoking crystal meth. The only similarity between these activities is that the person doing them enjoys them, and they all involve, therefore,  the part of your brain that facilitates the enjoyment of things.
The op-ed cites a <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27809571">study</a> published in the American Journal of Psychiatry which finds, at most, 1% of gamers who &#8220;might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder&#8221; (emphasis mine). But even this 1% figure is dubious. People who play video games &#8212; even people who spend way, way too much time playing them &#8212;  are not chemically dependent on the games the way that a heroin addict is dependent. Video games also don&#8217;t, in and of themselves, cause physical damage to the player. Sure, if you sit around all day playing games, you&#8217;ll get fat. But you&#8217;ll get fat if you sit around all day doing anything. On the other hand, if you sit around all day drinking alcohol, you might die directly from the effect the alcohol has on your internal organs.
What does this all mean? It means that a word like &#8220;addiction&#8221; is out of place when discussing video games. The compulsion to pick up a video game controller obviously belongs in a different category from the compulsion to pick up a crack pipe. They are not the same kind of thing, and they do not warrant the same kind of label or the same kind of treatment. By slapping &#8220;addiction&#8221; onto every bad habit, we are medicalizing normal and controllable human behaviors. Suddenly we have turned a lazy kid who just needs to get out of the house into a psychiatric patient who needs medication. In so doing, we have removed all of the power and control from his, and his parent&#8217;s, hands.
Speaking of parents, I think we have just answered the second question posed above. Who is to blame for all of this supposed video game addiction? Well, I&#8217;ll put it this way: 10-year-old children aren&#8217;t going out and buying their own games. They aren&#8217;t buying their own TVs, phones, and computers, either. If a child is playing games for several hours a day, it is because his parents have chosen to invest a considerable amount of money into fueling the hobby. So, why is your kid playing video games so much? Let us solve the mystery: it is because you are allowing and funding it.
I will never understand these parents who sit around with perplexed looks trying to figure out how to stop their kids from playing video games. The &#8220;how&#8221; is not difficult or complicated. Set boundaries. Tell them they are only allowed to play for a fixed amount of time during an appointed time frame. What if they disobey? Well then, take the games and drop them off at Goodwill. Or throw them in the fireplace. Or smash them with a hammer. Have some fun with it. They&#8217;re your video games, after all. You bought them. You can do what you want with them. And if you want to hand them over to your kid so that he can play them for six hours a day, barely stopping to bathe or eat and rarely leaving the house, that&#8217;s your choice. And your fault. Your child isn&#8217;t suffering from addiction. He&#8217;s suffering from a lack of parenting.

Video game controller

WALSH: Kids Aren’t Suffering From ‘Video Game Addiction.’ They’re Suffering From A Lack Of Parenting.

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President Trump on Friday signed a presidential proclamation that will prevent U.S. taxpayers from being forced to subsidize health care costs of legal immigrants, who will need to have their own insurance.
In the new rule, which goes into effect Nov. 3, most foreigners who apply for visas  will have to have their own employer-based health insurance or a non-subsidized private health insurance plan before they arrive. The rule does not apply to refugees or those seeking political asylum or nonimmigrant visas.
The <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/presidential-proclamation-suspension-entry-immigrants-will-financially-burden-united-states-healthcare-system/">proclamation</a> reads in part:
<blockquote>Healthcare providers and taxpayers bear substantial costs in paying for medical expenses incurred by people who lack health insurance or the ability to pay for their healthcare.  Hospitals and other providers often administer care to the uninsured without any hope of receiving reimbursement from them.  The costs associated with this care are passed on to the American people in the form of higher taxes, higher premiums, and higher fees for medical services.</blockquote>
&#8220;While our healthcare system grapples with the challenges caused by uncompensated care, the United States Government is making the problem worse by admitting thousands of aliens who have not demonstrated any ability to pay for their healthcare costs,&#8221; the proclamation says. &#8220;Notably, data show that lawful immigrants are about three times more likely than United States citizens to lack health insurance. Immigrants who enter this country should not further saddle our healthcare system, and subsequently American taxpayers, with higher costs.&#8221;
The new rule is expected to save billions of dollars.
&#8220;In total, uncompensated care costs — the overall measure of unreimbursed services that hospitals give their patients — have exceeded $35 billion in each of the last 10 years.  These costs amount to approximately $7 million on average for each hospital in the United States, and can drive hospitals into insolvency.  Beyond uncompensated care costs, the uninsured strain Federal and State government budgets through their reliance on publicly funded programs, which ultimately are financed by taxpayers,&#8221; the proclamation says.
More than 22 million non-citizens now live in the United States, according to data released last week by the U.S. Census Bureau. According to estimates extrapolated from data collected, 22.1 million are &#8220;not a U.S. citizen,&#8221; the data showed. The statistics also showed a record 13.7% of the nation&#8217;s 2018 population &#8212; nearly 44.7 million people &#8212; was born in another country, Census bureau researchers said. That&#8217;s the highest number of foreign-born citizens since 1910. Most are from Latin America.
Between 1960 and 1970, just one in 20 U.S. residents was foreign born.
&#8220;Today&#8217;s foreign-born resident rate has surged to about one in seven in California, Texas, Florida, and New York &#8212; the nation&#8217;s largest states &#8212; where the foreign born population is 15 percent higher than it is elsewhere in America,&#8221; <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7510149/New-U-S-Census-finds-22-1-million-American-residents-non-citizens.html">The Daily Mail</a> reported.
States and cities across the country are also spending billions on aid to illegal aliens. Los Angeles County, for instance, paid nearly $1.3 billion in welfare money during 2015 and 2016 to families of illegal aliens. That number amounts to one-​quarter of the total spent on the county’s entire needy population, according to <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/la-made-1-3b-in-illegal-immigrant-welfare-payouts-in-just-2-years">Fox News</a>.
In 2015, more than 58,000 families received $602 million in benefits. The next year, some 64,000 families received $675 million.
The sanctuary county of Los Angeles draws foreigners who enter the United States illegally and now has the largest concentration of any county ​in the nation, according to a study from the Migration Policy Institute. ​Illegal aliens in the county are allowed to receive welfare and food stamp benefits.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said, including the costs of education, police and fire, medical, and subsidized housing — which can total $24,000 per year in government spending per family.

High Angle View Of Stethoscope Over White Background

Trump Signs Order To Prevent Taxpayers From Subsidizing Health Care For Immigrants

Illegal Immigration

Immigration

On Tuesday, The Hill-HarrisX released a <a href="https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/462813-voter-support-for-forms-of-universal-health-care-declines?amp">new poll</a> on the public perception of various kinds of health care.
While health care is always a hot topic, the 2020 Democratic presidential race has served to magnify the issue, with candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) very publicly pushing government-run systems that would eliminate private insurance. Other Democratic candidates, such as Mayor Pete Buttigieg, have hedged, arguing instead for a hybrid system that wouldn’t eliminate private insurance entirely – at least at the start.
The poll, which was conducted between September 20-21, asked 1,000 registered voters which statement about health care &#8220;comes closest&#8221; to their view.
Coming out on top with 27% was the following statement: &#8220;Medicare/Medicaid should be expanded to cover all citizens regardless of age or income, but people should be able to purchase private supplemental plans.&#8221;
In second place with 25%: &#8220;Any citizen should be able to sign up for Medicare/Medicaid regardless of age or income while those with private plans could keep their existing insurance.&#8221;
In third place with 19%: &#8220;The current healthcare system should be kept as is.&#8221;
In fourth place with 18%: &#8220;The government should remove itself from paying for all health care.&#8221;
In a distant fifth place with just 10% was this statement: &#8220;Medicare/Medicaid should be expanded to cover all citizens regardless of age or income and private health plans should be abolished.&#8221;
For those keeping track, that’s 89% of voters who, to varying degrees, don’t believe that private health care should be abolished versus 10% who do. Moreover, 18% want the government out of health care altogether. For the Democratic presidential candidates advocating single-payer health care systems, those numbers represent quite a blow.
Further, this isn’t the only poll in which respondents have noted a distaste for government-run systems.
A <a href="https://morningconsult.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/190675_crosstabs_POLITICO_RVs_v2_BH.pdf">Politico/Morning Consult</a> survey, conducted between June 29 and July 1, asked 1,472 registered voters, &#8220;Do you support or oppose &#8230; a &#8216;Medicare for All&#8217; health care system, where all Americans would get their health insurance from the government?&#8221;
30% of respondents &#8220;strongly support,&#8221; 23% &#8220;somewhat support,&#8221; 23% &#8220;strongly oppose,&#8221; and 13% &#8220;somewhat oppose.&#8221;
However, respondents were then asked: &#8220;Do you support or oppose &#8230; the public health insurance option, a system in which Americans can choose to purchase medical coverage either entirely from a federally-run health program, entirely from private insurers, or a combination of both?&#8221;
When the question included the idea of maintaining the choice of private insurance, the answers changed pretty dramatically: 33% &#8220;strongly support,&#8221; 35% &#8220;somewhat support,&#8221; 8% &#8220;strongly oppose,&#8221; and 9% &#8220;somewhat oppose.&#8221;
Lastly, the survey asked, &#8220;Would you support or oppose &#8216;Medicare for All&#8217; if it diminished the role of private insurers?&#8221; 24% &#8220;strongly support,&#8221; 22% &#8220;somewhat support,&#8221; 26% &#8220;strongly oppose,&#8221; and 9% &#8220;somewhat oppose.&#8221;
The results show that when private insurance maintains a presence in the question, favorability for a government-run option goes up. When private insurance is &#8220;diminished,&#8221; support goes down.
The plans proffered by the likes of Sanders and some of his colleagues would eliminate private insurance altogether. However, because the Politico/Morning Consult survey doesn’t explicitly ask respondents about such an option, the Hill-HarrisX poll is vital in gauging the feelings of the American people regarding a Medicare-for-All plan that would eliminate private insurance.

NEW POLL: Only 10% Of Americans Favor System Where Private Health Insurance ‘Abolished’

On Friday, former Vice President and 2020 Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden held an outdoor town hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. During the event, Biden spoke about health care.
After claiming that the notion of Medicare-for-All, which has been proposed by presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), is &#8220;a great idea,&#8221; the former vice president noted that the estimated annual cost would be &#8220;twice the national budget,&#8221; adding that such a cost would require the raising of taxes, and could be especially harmful during a recession.
As Biden began to speak about his own health care plan, a woman in the crowd interjected, blasting &#8220;profits in health care,&#8221; and claiming that she would be willing to pay an extra 9% in taxes for a government-run system.
Following a brief back-and-forth, Biden roasted the woman by suggesting she has &#8220;the right candidate in Bernie.&#8221;
[Some of what the woman says is unclear. As such, the portions of her remarks that appear in brackets have been inserted for clarity, and aren’t necessarily the exact words she used.]
<blockquote>BIDEN: For example, we’ve got to be smarter in what we do to get to where we need to get. I take Obamacare and I reestablish all that was cut from it &#8230; and I add a public option to it, and I allow you to keep your private health insurance. If you&#8217;ve negotiated hard with a company over the years and you have a private plan you like – as long as you have it, you can keep it, but if you don&#8217;t like it or it&#8217;s cut, you can immediately join this new plan, which is an amped-up Obamacare. &#8230; My plan costs a lot of money. It costs $740 billion over ten years. It does not cost $30 to $40 trillion &#8230; over the next ten years, and I think [it] works better, by the way&#8230;
WOMAN: There’s still profits in health care though.
BIDEN: Sure there’s profits in health care &#8230; but everybody gets health care, and you only have a few people – are you prepared to pay nine more percent in your taxes?
WOMAN: You bet [because] I don’t even have the kind of health insurance that some companies cover.
BIDEN: Well, okay.
WOMAN: We need to have a leader that isn’t protecting insurance companies’ profits.
BIDEN: I am not protecting insurance – that’s unfair to say. &#8230; Here’s the deal. Insurance companies are strongly against my plan. They&#8217;re against Obamacare. They&#8217;re fighting against it because they know it costs them. But here&#8217;s the deal. If you have worked your whole life, you&#8217;ve given up five, seven, eight percent of your salary to get coverage with a plan that you may have with your employer, and now what’s going to happen? If you are no longer able to keep it, what happens? The employer gets multibillion-dollar breaks across the board, and you think they&#8217;re going to give it back to you?
WOMAN: [They’re going to give it back] to the government so we can pay for that insurance.
BIDEN: Well, they’re not going to give it to the government.
WOMAN: [We’re] going to make them do it.
BIDEN: Well, God love you. You’ve got the right candidate in Bernie; you got the right one. Well, and Elizabeth, or whomever you have. That’s a great thing, but here&#8217;s the point, folks. We have to be able to level with you &#8230; let&#8217;s at least acknowledge – tell Elizabeth &#8230; it’s going to cost a lot of money, and she&#8217;s gonna raise peoples’ taxes doing it. And what are we going to do in the middle of a recession if we ended up there?</blockquote>
The pertinent portion of the video begins at the 46:36 mark:
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According to <a href="https://reason.com/2019/07/17/bernie-sanders-medicare-for-all-cost-40-trillion-obamacare-single-payer/">multiple estimates</a>, the cost of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-All system would be approximately $32 trillion over ten years. Back in July, Sanders himself offered a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2019/07/16/transcript-candidates-sen-bernie-sanders/">similar estimate</a> of between $30 trillion to $40 trillion over a decade.
Sanders has <a href="https://www.apnews.com/a7268bd5902f40c3a98f0c64d9b78163">previously acknowledged</a> that middle-class taxes will have to be increased for a Medicare-for-All system to function.
Sen. Warren has been much more vague. During the most recent Democratic primary debate, she <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/read-full-transcript-abc-news-3rd-democratic-debate/story?id=65587810">said the following</a> about her health care plan:
<blockquote>And now the question is, how best can we improve on it? And I believe the best way we can do that is we make sure that everybody gets covered by health care at the lowest possible cost. How do we pay for it? Those at the very top, the richest individuals and the biggest corporations, are going to pay more. And middle class families are going to pay less. That’s how this is going to work.</blockquote>
When pressed by moderator George Stephanopoulos about a potential increase in taxes on the middle class given such an ambitious plan, Warren pivoted to &#8220;total cost,&#8221; and said in part that with &#8220;Medicare-for-All, costs are going to go up for wealthier individuals, and costs are going to go up for giant corporations, but for hard-working families across this country, costs are going to go down, and that&#8217;s how it should work under Medicare-for-All in our health care system.&#8221;

Joe Biden

Watch Biden Roast Woman In Exchange Over Health Care: ‘You’ve Got The Right Candidate In Bernie’

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) criticized Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Thursday after the Democratic presidential candidate tried to pander to America’s veterans by treating them like victims.
&#8220;On a deeper level, I have always disliked it when politicians start pandering to veterans and telling us how bad we have it, and that if we just vote for them then they will fix all of our problems. That is just not true,&#8221; Crenshaw said during an appearance on Fox News. &#8220;It also gets to a really false choice, which is why we went to war in the first place.&#8221;
&#8220;I went there because our country needed it,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;We went there because it was in the best interest of our country — I wasn&#8217;t thinking down the road of being taken care of.&#8221;
<div class="embed video fluid-video">Watch the latest video at <a href="https://www.foxnews.com">foxnews.com</a></div>
Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, has been an outspoken advocate on behalf of veterans since he was elected to Congress in 2018. He served five deployments overseas, and while on his third combat tour, he was hit by an IED blast during a mission in Afghanistan that destroyed his right eye and badly injured his left eye. After multiple surgeries, Crenshaw regained sight in his left eye and went on to deploy two more times — first to the Middle East and then to South Korea.
&#8220;Now, of course that doesn&#8217;t mean that we should not take care of our veterans. But this is also another, I think, falsehood that Bernie is spreading,&#8221; Crenshaw said, before noting that improving veterans&#8217; health care through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has always been a bipartisan issue.
&#8220;We spend far more on the VA than we have in the past,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;Every single year as a delegation, as a Congress, we look for ways to improve veteran care and he knows that.&#8221;
&#8220;But what he&#8217;s doing is he&#8217;s trying to rile people up,&#8221; Crenshaw added. &#8220;He is trying to make people angry. He is trying to tell veterans that they are victims and that only he can take care of them and I just think that’s such a dishonest way to do politics and I think he should be called out for it.&#8221;
The Texas congressman&#8217;s remarks were in reference to a tweet Sanders posted over the weekend that stated: &#8220;[I]f you can&#8217;t afford to take care of your veterans, then don&#8217;t go to war.&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">Watching Bernie pander to different groups to get their vote has always disgusted me, but now it’s personal.
I didn’t go to war so that you would take care of me, Bernie. I went because I wanted to serve and our country needed it. <a href="https://t.co/ADhxrvtIA9">https://t.co/ADhxrvtIA9</a>
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) <a href="https://twitter.com/DanCrenshawTX/status/1173963177412956160?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 17, 2019</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;Watching Bernie pander to different groups to get their vote has always disgusted me, but now it’s personal,&#8221; Crenshaw responded at the time. &#8220;I didn&#8217;t go to war so that you would take care of me, Bernie. I went because I wanted to serve and our country needed it.&#8221;
The retired lieutenant commander was thrown into the spotlight a week prior to election day in 2018 after Saturday Night Live mocked him for the injuries he sustained while fighting for America. The incident springboarded Crenshaw into the national political arena and he has largely been considered a rising star in the Republican Party ever since.

Dan Crenshaw

WATCH: Dan Crenshaw Slams Bernie For Treating Veterans As Victims: ‘That’s Such A Dishonest Way To Do Politics’

Saturday Night Live

Veterans Affairs (VA)

Thomas Fahr Steyer, a California-based billionaire and leftist activist focusing on environmental issues, is a candidate for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Steyer, a longtime leftist philanthropist and prolific donor to Democratic candidates and causes, is by far the wealthiest candidate in the 2020 Democratic field. Steyer&#8217;s political activism has focused disproportionately on environmentalism and global warming/climate change issues, although he has the political profile of an across-the-board, full-spectrum progressive/leftist. As the most recent entrant into the 2020 Democratic presidential field, he does not yet register in <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/democratic_nomination_polls/">current polling for the nomination</a>.
Steyer, who has a bachelor degree from Yale University and a MBA from Stanford University, is the founder of San Francisco-based hedge fund Farallon Capital and the co-founder of Oakland-based Beneficial State Bank. In 2012, Steyer stepped down from Farallon in order to focus more of his time on environmentalist/alternative energy advocacy. In addition to his involvement with Beneficial State Bank, which focuses on community development, Steyer has been involved with other leftist philanthropic causes — including his <a href="http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Tom-Steyer-says-effort-to-end-inequality-isn-t-6438690.php">2015 founding</a> of the Fair Shake Commission on Income Inequality and Middle Class Opportunity, which promotes reducing income inequality. But above all, Steyer has spent more time and resources on environmentalist activism. In 2013, for example, Steyer founded NextGen America, an environmentalist nonprofit and political action committee.
Steyer, who would become the first president with a Jewish parent if successfully elected, is married and has four children. He has an <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/thomas-steyer/">estimated net worth</a> of $1.6 billion, and has committed self-funding his 2020 presidential bid to the tune of <a href="https://time.com/5623149/tom-steyer-presidential-campaign/">$100 million</a>.
Electoral History: Steyer has never sought political office prior to his current campaign for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. However, he has a lengthy history of involvement in partisan Democratic causes. Steyer has been a prolific fundraiser for many leading Democrats over the past few decades, including for Barack Obama in 2008. Steyer also spoke at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and reportedly considered a 2018 run for California governor.
On The Issues: Perhaps more so than any of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, Steyer&#8217;s candidacy revolves around one core issue: Environmentalism. He has made global warming prevention, opposition to the oil and natural gas industries, and a concomitant greater government role in investing in alternative energy sources the central tenets of his public activist profile. Steyer has a less prolific track record and history of commentary on other issues, but all available evidences points toward his being an across-the-board, full-spectrum progressive/leftist. For example, his 2020 campaign <a href="https://www.tomsteyer.com/about-tom/">website</a> also touts his work in &#8220;promot[ing] social justice and increas[ing] participation in our democracy through voter registration and grassroots organizing.&#8221;
Constitution: Steyer has a very thin public record of commenting on legal and judicial issues. He has, however, been a prominent advocate for impeaching President Donald Trump. Steyer has stated that he opposes Citizens United v. F.E.C., the U.S. Supreme Court&#8217;s landmark 2010 political speech-affirming case. He also <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/12/megadonor-steyer-abortion-rights-candidates-241563">supports</a> Roe v. Wade, thus indicating a belief in the so-called constitutional &#8220;right to privacy&#8221; and &#8220;right to abortion.&#8221; Steyer has suggested sympathy for gun control measures that would undermine Americans&#8217; Second Amendment rights, and he also supports a robust role for the federal government in economic regulation that is consistent with mainstream legal progressivism.
Economy: Steyer supports raising personal taxes and strongly opposed President Trump&#8217;s 2017 tax cut law. In his 2020 campaign announcement video, Steyer <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-does-tom-steyer-believe-where-the-candidate-stands-on-6-issues">lamented</a> how corporations have an &#8220;unlimited ability to participate in politics, [which] will skew everything because they only care about profits.&#8221; His anti-corporation message is also decidedly populist, as Steyer has also <a href="https://www.axios.com/tom-steyer-on-the-issues-in-under-500-words-2020-presidential-election-2e5a747a-b6bf-459d-a581-e7d1efcd75bd.html">said</a> that &#8220;the only way for us to solve the urgent problems facing our country is to loosen the stranglehold that corporations have over our politicians and return political power to the American people.&#8221; Like many of his 2020 Democratic rivals, Steyer also <a href="https://www.latimes.com/la-pol-sac-essential-poli-tom-steyer-praises-minimum-wage-hike-1459196428-htmlstory.html">supports</a> raising the federal minimum wage. Steyer, though a billionaire, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/12/this-billionaire-wants-trump-to-raise-his-taxes.html">vocally opposes</a> income inequality.
Health Care: Steyer <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/tom-steyer-2020-democrats/540357/">supports</a> &#8220;Medicare for All,&#8221; which would effectively amount to a single-payer health insurance system and a de facto governmental takeover of health insurance and imposition of socialized medicine in America. He <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-does-tom-steyer-believe-where-the-candidate-stands-on-6-issues">has been critical</a> of the perceived corporate greed of large pharmaceutical companies.
Immigration: Steyer has been harshly critical of the Trump administration&#8217;s attempts to secure our border amidst a hitherto unprecedented influx there of Central American migrants. Steyer <a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/392482-billionaire-steyer-to-invest-1-million-to-help-immigrants-fight">donated</a> last year to leftist/open-borders legal groups at the southern border working to assist illegal aliens facing deportation. He <a href="https://twitter.com/TomSteyer/status/1146079566374457344">addresses</a> illegal immigration in starkly pro-illegal alien — and not rule-of-law — terminology. Steyer appears to <a href="https://nextgenamerica.org/issues/immigration/">support</a> a pathway to citizenship for much of America&#8217;s illegal alien populace.
Foreign Policy: Steyer has a thin track record on foreign policy, although he <a href="https://twitter.com/TomSteyer/status/1005947721361121281?s=20">has been critical</a> of President Trump&#8217;s foreign policy approach. He has also taken the standard leftist approach to Special Counsel Bob Mueller&#8217;s now-infamous report: <a href="https://www.needtoimpeach.com/obstruction-of-justice/">Accusing</a> President Trump of obstruction of justice.
Abortion: Steyer is <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Thomas_Steyer">emphatically pro-abortion</a>.
Guns: Steyer has founded organizations have <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Thomas_Steyer">worked closely</a>, at times, with anti-Second Amendment organizations. He is largely seen as sympathetic to gun control initiatives.

Where Does Tom Steyer Stand On The Issues? Here’s Everything You Need To Know.

Abortion

Climate Change

Constitution

Democratic Socialism

Donald Trump

Environmentalism

Foreign Policy

Last night, Robert Francis &#8220;Beto&#8221; O&#8217;Rourke doubled down, in <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51718/beto-says-hell-yes-were-going-take-americans-guns-james-barrett">rather colorful fashion</a>, on his vow to confiscate from law-abiding Americans their <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51381/hammer-i-will-never-ever-let-government-buy-back-josh-hammer">cherished</a> rifles whose <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/44327/hammer-here-are-three-core-reasons-oppose-ban-josh-hammer">cosmetically amorphous and technically undefinable</a> features lead leftists to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/50263/hammer-conservatives-must-not-go-soft-assault-josh-hammer">peculiarly label</a> them so-called &#8220;assault weapons.&#8221; &#8220;Hell yes, we are going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,&#8221; O&#8217;Rourke said to enthusiastic audience applause, as The Daily Wire&#8217;s James Barrett <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51718/beto-says-hell-yes-were-going-take-americans-guns-james-barrett">reported</a>.
Last night, furthermore, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43796/hammer-bernie-sanders-entire-worldview-grotesquely-josh-hammer">communist</a> loonbag <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48572/where-does-bernie-sanders-stand-issues-heres-josh-hammer">Bernie Sanders</a> and demagogic harridan <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48596/where-does-elizabeth-warren-stand-issues-heres-josh-hammer">Elizabeth Warren</a> each doubled down in their joint defense of a one-size-fits-all socialized medicine national health care takeover that would, in the estimate of fellow 2020 presidential contender <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49364/where-does-amy-klobuchar-stand-issues-heres-josh-hammer">Amy Klobuchar</a>, strip over 140 million Americans of their privately held health insurance plans. Joe Biden, the purported &#8220;moderate&#8221; in this hellish menagerie, parroted last night the &#8220;no one will lose his doctor under Obamacare&#8221; ruse — a ruse, that is, which was literally exposed by left-leaning PolitiFact as its 2013 &#8220;Lie of the Year&#8221; with respect to the very underlying health care plan Biden now haplessly touts.
All of this, of course, came precisely two primary debates after open-borders zealot Julian Castro decided to hail the pagan glory that is abortion for <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49056/hammer-democratic-party-fundamentally-unfit-lead-josh-hammer">&#8220;trans females&#8221;</a> — which would be biological men who subjectively feel as if they are women. The careful reader — or really anyone who has ever opened a biology textbook — will note that a member of the human species with both X and Y chromosomes, otherwise known as a man, cannot possibly procure an abortion even if he desires to do so. Yet we are still reliably informed that the Democrats, who have never seen a statist economic program they didn&#8217;t tendentiously glom onto under the hectoring veneer of &#8220;climate change,&#8221; are the Party of Science™.
I am not sure if the Democrats are the Party of Science. But I do know that the modern Democratic Party, which promotes youngsters who would&#8217;ve been <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49515/hammer-aocs-squad-will-destroy-democrats-2020-josh-hammer">right at home in the Soviet Politburo</a> and remains emphatically <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51709/hammer-democratic-party-fatally-attracted-hardcore-josh-hammer">in the throes of its leftist base</a>, has not merely become <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/49056/hammer-democratic-party-fundamentally-unfit-lead-josh-hammer">fundamentally unfit</a> to govern the United States of America. It has also become an utter parody of its very self.
For decades, Republicans have mocked Democratic anti-gun proposals by calling them &#8220;gun grabbers.&#8221; Now, Beto O&#8217;Rourke is literally promoting — and <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/13/beto-orourke-selling-t-shirts-hell-yes-were-going-/">fundraising</a> off of! — his proposal to forcibly confiscate the firearms of tens of millions of peaceful, law-abiding gun owners. In <a href="http://theresurgent.com/2019/09/13/is-beto-orourke-trying-to-sabotage-the-democrats-again/">sabotaging</a> his own party, O&#8217;Rourke has outed the Democratic id for the masses to see — and boy, is it <a href="https://twitter.com/MattMackowiak/status/1172315168446935040">ugly</a>.
For years if not decades, Republicans have ridiculed Democratic health care proposals by asserting their pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams on socializing medicine would inevitably lead to the stripping away of private health insurance for tens of millions of Americans. Now, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democratic_presidential_nomination-6730.html">two of the top three contenders</a> for the Democrats&#8217; 2020 presidential nomination, are advocating for precisely that. A major political party entertained a genuine policy debate last night on the efficacy and morality of eradicating the health insurance plans of over 140 million Americans. Think about that for a second.
For years, Republicans have sneered at Democrats that their anti-biology crusade in the realm of normalizing &#8220;transgenderism&#8221; was, ultimately, untenable. Biology, many conservatives have told their Party of Science™ counterparts, is immutable. Now, Julian Castro advocates <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/51556/hammer-bernies-pagan-support-child-sacrifice-josh-hammer">pagan-esque unborn child sacrifice for Moloch</a> for a &#8220;class&#8221; of human beings who are <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48927/walsh-democrats-put-their-scientific-illiteracy-matt-walsh">biologically incapable of bearing children</a>. Contemporary fealty to political correctness apparently demands such devout obeisance to the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup lobby such that science itself must be subordinated and shunned.
We are truly through the looking-glass.
Forget The Onion. Forget The Babylon Bee. Parody is here, and its name is the Democratic Party.

ABC Houston Democratic presidential debate.jpg

HAMMER: The Democratic Party Has Become A Parody Of Itself

Beto O'Rourke

Global Warming

Gun Buybacks

The media and politicians tell us there is a &#8220;<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/everyone-should-be-alarmed-by-the-vaping-crisis/2019/09/09/1f2413f8-d329-11e9-9343-40db57cf6abd_story.html">crisis</a>,&#8221; an &#8220;<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/dr-siegel-vaping-related-deaths-epidemic">epidemic</a>,&#8221; an &#8220;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/11/trump-to-consider-e-cigarette-policy-amid-outbreak-of-lung-disease.html">outbreak</a>,&#8221; even a &#8220;<a href="https://khn.org/morning-breakout/viewpoints-gops-unpopular-efforts-to-repeal-health-law-are-backfiring-with-voters-teen-vaping-is-a-looming-public-health-catastrophe/">catastrophe</a>&#8221; gripping our country. Worse yet, our children — think of the children! — are caught in the middle of it. The disaster is so very disastrous that the White House is leaping into action.
President Trump has announced that his administration will move for a ban on flavored e-cigarettes. Yes, vaping. Vaping is the crisis. Vaping is what threatens to bring about armageddon if we do not act.
Leaving aside the not-insignificant question of whether the president has the constitutional authority to unilaterally ban a consumer product (he doesn&#8217;t), is this apocalyptic fervor justified? Is there really anything that might reasonably be described as a &#8220;vaping epidemic&#8221; occurring? The answer, of course, is no. Not even close.
There have been six <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/09/11/kansas-reports-6th-death-related-vaping-lung-illness/2283959001/">deaths</a> in America possibly linked to vaping — six deaths out of the more than 11 million people who report using e-cigarettes. If you&#8217;re keeping track at home, that&#8217;s a fatality rate of .0005%. By comparison, <a href="https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-facts-and-statistics">88,000</a> people die from alcohol-related causes every year. An estimated <a href="https://health.usnews.com/health-news/patient-advice/articles/2016-09-27/the-danger-in-taking-prescribed-medications">128,000</a> people die from prescription pills annually. The death toll in both cases also represents a very small percentage, but the percentage is probably quite a bit higher than vaping&#8217;s meager .0005%. No matter how you look at it, the numbers just don&#8217;t come close to justifying words like &#8220;outbreak&#8221; and &#8220;catastrophe.&#8221; And they certainly don&#8217;t justify unconstitutional action from the president (not that anything ever could).
But the panic is even more absurd and counterproductive than it first appears. Keep in mind that the <a href="https://www.commentarymagazine.com/american-society/vaping-a-moral-panic/">majority</a> of the people who&#8217;ve gotten sick or died from vaping were using unlicensed, black market products. By outlawing most e-cigarettes, we are only driving more people towards precisely the kind of vaping that&#8217;s causing the problem in the first place. This is a solution to a fake problem that will inevitably cause the fake problem to become a real problem. In other words, it is exactly the kind of solution our government specializes in.
Personally, I don&#8217;t vape. It&#8217;s not my thing. I find it kind of weird, to be honest. But &#8220;kind of weird&#8221; and &#8220;not my thing&#8221; can&#8217;t in themselves justify sweeping prohibitions. My toxin of choice is alcohol. Though I drink in moderation, it would probably be healthier if I didn&#8217;t drink at all. Still, that&#8217;s my decision and my concern. I don&#8217;t need any bureaucrat to hold my hand in the liquor store and guide me towards the booze varieties that he finds most acceptable. That&#8217;s not how it&#8217;s supposed to work in a free country.
But if we are going to start banning unhealthy substances, we have a lot of banning to do before we get to comparatively mild and safe e-cigarettes. We shouldn&#8217;t start with alcohol, either: The government tried that once already and it didn&#8217;t turn out very well. The leading cause of death in America is <a href="https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/obesity-leading-cause-death-america-shame">obesity</a>. Here we have an actual public health emergency. People are fat and only getting fatter. Yet soda and fast food — two staples of Trump&#8217;s diet, as it happens — remain not only legal, but are often marketed specifically to children. So let us confiscate all the Happy Meals and send government agents to locate and destroy all vending machines. Maybe then we can start worrying about vaping.

Man Smoking E-Cigarette

WALSH: The Media Claim There’s A Vaping ‘Crisis’ And President Trump Wants To Ban It. Here’s Why The Hysteria Is Absurd.

Media

Last week, the wife of Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-SC) posted an Instagram video to &#8220;rant&#8221; about her healthcare costs, especially whining about her marriage counseling bill not covered under her Obamacare &#8220;gold&#8221; plan. The wife and mother announced that she was going to &#8220;[reach] out to my congressman,&#8221; who happens to be her husband.
&#8220;I&#8217;m gonna have a little bit of a rant here on social media because I think this is important,&#8221; Amanda Cunningham started the video, as reported by <a href="https://freebeacon.com/politics/dem-congressmans-wife-mind-blowing-our-insurance-doesnt-cover-marriage-counseling/">The Washington Free Beacon</a>. &#8220;I&#8217;ve been going over my not-a-bill bill here from Blue Cross Blue Shield, and realizing that, once again, all of my mental health therapy sessions are denied, in addition to all of our marriage counseling sessions.&#8221;
&#8220;It&#8217;s just mind-blowing to me that these basic well-known needs, that mental health is healthcare, are still being denied, that we&#8217;re still fighting for these absolutely basic things, it&#8217;s unbelievable to me,&#8221; she continued. &#8220;So I&#8217;m reaching out to my congressman — yes, also my husband — but saying, like, hey, what can we do about this? Let&#8217;s go to the House floor, let&#8217;s write a bill, Iet&#8217;s — I don&#8217;t know what you do, but let&#8217;s do it because this is ridiculous.&#8221;
&#8220;This affects us, our family, it affects everyone else who&#8217;s seeking mental health and needs support doing so. I&#8217;m just flabbergasted,&#8221; Cunningham ended the video post.
Rep. Cunningham is given access to the Obamacare &#8220;gold&#8221; plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield as a member of Congress and is &#8220;responsible for paying about a quarter of the premiums,&#8221; the Beacon noted.
For the affluent family to have their marriage counseling sessions covered in their plan, far less affluent Americans would see their premiums rise.
&#8220;She didn&#8217;t say it outright, but in her &#8216;rant,&#8217; Cunningham wanted to raise premiums on other Americans — most of whom earn far less than her family — so she would receive &#8216;free&#8217; therapy,&#8221; explained author and Juniper Research Group CEO Christopher Jacobs at <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/10/democrat-reps-wife-demands-free-marriage-counseling-taxpayer-subsidized-health-plan/">The Federalist</a>. &#8220;Viewed from this perspective, her objections seem somewhat self-serving from a family in the upper tier of the income spectrum.&#8221;
Jacobs noted that Obamacare, which was mandated by way of penalty on the American people by Democrats, already spiked healthcare costs, hurting Americans far less wealthy that the Cunningham family:
<blockquote>In CBO&#8217;s view, the law required people to buy richer insurance policies, and those richer policies encouraged people to consume more health care, both of which led to a rise in premiums. Unfortunately, that rise in premiums over the past several years has led millions of individuals who do not qualify for insurance subsidies (unlike Amanda Cunningham) to drop their coverage.</blockquote>
WATCH:
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">New video: Dem congressman Joe Cunningham&#8217;s wife is outraged her taxpayer-subsidized Obamacare plan doesn&#8217;t pay for her therapy, their marriage counseling<a href="https://t.co/HQLyf1g4Iy">https://t.co/HQLyf1g4Iy</a> <a href="https://t.co/3NXD4qD98c">pic.twitter.com/3NXD4qD98c</a>
— Brent Scher (@BrentScher) <a href="https://twitter.com/BrentScher/status/1171134249581371392?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
The video of Mrs. Cunningham&#8217;s self-described &#8220;rant&#8221; landed as out-of-touch for many on social media.
&#8220;Why do I need to pay for her marriage counseling LOL,&#8221; asked Congressional candidate Joe Saladino.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none">Why do I need to pay for her marriage counseling LOL
— Saladino for Congress (@JoeySalads) <a href="https://twitter.com/JoeySalads/status/1171177167679557632?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
&#8220;Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for male liberals because their side has created a Frankenstein in the name of feminism and their women come across as narcissistic. But then I realize that if you create Frankenstein then you have to live with it,&#8221; responded pro-life crusader Obianuju Ekeocha.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none">Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for male liberals because their side has created a Frankenstein in the name of feminism and their women come across as narcissistic. But then I realize that if you create Frankenstein then you have to live with it.
— Obianuju Ekeocha (@obianuju) <a href="https://twitter.com/obianuju/status/1171197817773338625?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
&#8220;&#8216;I don&#8217;t know what you do… ,'&#8221; popular conservative writer and Twitter account &#8220;AG Conservative&#8221; pointedly mocked, adding laughing emojis.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none">&#8220;I don&#8217;t know what you do &#8230;&#8221;
— (((AG))) (@AG_Conservative) <a href="https://twitter.com/AG_Conservative/status/1171231191594393601?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 10, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>

Congressman Cunningham

WATCH: Dem’s Wife Posts Video Complaining That Taxpayers Aren’t Footing Bill For Her Marriage Counseling

South Carolina

Former Republican New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu criticized Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Monday for promoting policies that are so far to the left that they resemble those of socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro.
“It sounds like Bernie Sanders is having his policies and statements written by the Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro,” Sununu told Fox News host Sandra Smith when asked about the presidential candidate’s new proposal to cancel $81 billion of medical debt. “I mean, this is socialism to the extreme.”
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
“I think it indicates that Bernie has decided that it is down to a two-person race with Elizabeth Warren and what he has to do in order to win is to out-pander her,” he continued. “And so you’re going to see a continuing series of all of these.”
Accordingly, the Vermont senator previewed an upcoming plan that would wipe away individuals’ past-due medical bills without impacting their credit scores. The $81 billion price tag is exclusive of his Medicare-for-All plan — a keystone of his presidential campaign — which estimates indicate could cost as much as $40 trillion.
In June, Sanders unveiled a separate proposal to eliminate the student loan debt of every American — approximately 45 million people. That sweeping plan would cost upwards of $1.5 trillion.
“But the other thing that comes out of this statement — and Republicans ought to take advantage of it — is that Bernie Sanders is doing an extremely good job of telling us what a disaster Obamacare is and that Obamacare really has to be replaced,” Sununu said.
The New Hampshire governor also noted that as Sanders and fellow progressive challenger Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) battle for the far-left lane of the current Democratic presidential primary, both candidates will likely try to outdo each other on the “everything for everybody” front.
“[Health insurance] is becoming a big test and they’re all pounding Obamacare and in ways that Republicans weren’t as effective as these Democrats seem to be,” Sununu said. “The only one defending Obamacare — and it’s beginning to slip even there — is [former Vice President] Joe Biden.”
Biden, who is largely running on former President Barack Obama’s legacy, is one of the only leading Democratic contenders not to advocate for a Medicare-for-All system that would overhaul the entire health insurance market. Rather, he has vowed to reinstate Obamacare&#8217;s individual mandate to attempt to ensure all Americans obtain sufficient health insurance.
The mandate was initially part of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, more commonly referred to as Obamacare. As a way to bypass the unconstitutional requirement to force Americans to purchase insurance, the individual mandate was upheld in 2012 by the U.S. Supreme Court as an income-based tax levy.
The individual mandate was repealed after President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017.
“For everyone but Biden this has become an effort to be attractive to the millennials who have absolutely no idea what things cost and who have absolutely no idea that eventually — as Margaret Thatcher said — in socialism, you begin to run out of other people’s money,” Sununu added.

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