As some have warned for weeks, an unintended though anticipated consequence of nationwide shutdown measures is the mass layoffs of tens of thousands of healthcare workers, and that number is climbing.
As highlighted by both The New York Times and The Associated Press, hospitals and healthcare facilities across the nation have delayed so-called elective surgeries and non-COVID-19 related medical actions in preparation for the predicted onslaught of novel coronavirus patients, mostly by state order.
&#8220;Governors in <a class="css-1g7m0tk" title="" href="https://www.ascassociation.org/asca/resourcecenter/latestnewsresourcecenter/covid-19/covid-19-state" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">dozens of states</a> have delivered executive orders or guidelines directing hospitals to stop nonurgent procedures and surgeries to various degrees,&#8221; <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/us/politics/coronavirus-health-care-workers-layoffs.html">The New York Times</a> noted. &#8220;Last month, the United States surgeon general, Dr. Jerome M. Adams, also <a class="css-1g7m0tk" title="" href="https://twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1238798972501852160?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">implored</a> hospitals to halt elective procedures.&#8221;
The massive decline in revenue, however, has resulted in at least 42,000 healthcare workers filing for unemployment, Department of Labor numbers revealed last week.
&#8220;Tens of thousands of medical workers across the United States are suddenly out of work as operating rooms and doctor&#8217;s offices go dark, casualties of urgent calls to prioritize coronavirus patients at overwhelmed hospitals and of the economic waves the crisis is churning,&#8221; <a href="https://www.newswest9.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/health-care-jobs-are-a-mounting-casualty-of-coronavirus-crisis/507-d656ba85-b425-49c3-85b5-b325340e3a64">The Associated Press</a> reported Saturday. &#8220;Big-city physician and specialist groups, tiny independent hospitals from Oregon to Connecticut, and big multistate hospital systems such as Steward Health Care are seeing big dropoffs in revenue and laying off or furloughing hundreds of workers.&#8221;
Even in coronavirus &#8220;hot spots,&#8221; healthcare workers are having their hours cut or given pink slips, the Times highlighted: &#8220;[T]rained health care workers sidelined, even in areas around Detroit and Washington, where infection rates are climbing, and even as hard-hit hospitals are pleading for help.&#8221;
The cuts to healthcare are expected to continue, and the numbers available currently are seemingly only the tip of the iceberg.
&#8220;Not all states release that data in real time,&#8221; the AP explained, &#8220;although Minnesota reported that from March 16 through March 31, more than 13,600 health care practitioners or technicians filed unemployment claims in that state alone.&#8221;
While &#8220;[s]ome layoffs, the generally permanent loss of a job, and furloughs, a reduction in hours or a leave of absence with the option to return, are focused on nonclinical staff,&#8221; the report says, &#8220;[e]lsewhere, clinical professionals — specialists, lab techs, operating room staffs, nurse specialists, support staff — suddenly find themselves with a cut in pay or hours, or sitting at home, including some in coronavirus hotspots.&#8221;
In Tennessee, Erlanger Health System said they lost millions of dollars in one week of the shutdown alone, according to AP.
Sarasota Memorial Health Care System in Florida had to drastically cut employees on Friday, after losing an estimated $16 million in expected revenue in March alone.
&#8220;Sarasota Memorial Hospital announced it will furlough some workers and reduce hours for others due to a &#8216;sudden and drastic drop in patient volumes and revenues,'&#8221; an ABC affiliate <a href="https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/region-sarasota-manatee/sarasota-memorial-hospital-furloughs-employees-due-to-drastic-drop-in-patient-volumes">reported</a> Friday. &#8220;According to officials, Sarasota Memoria Hospital experienced a $16 million reduction in revenue in March. After non-emergency procedures were canceled due to the pandemic, surgery cases fell by more than 50 percent and the hospital saw a 30-percent drop on the number of inpatients, according to the press release.&#8221;
The entire state of Florida has <a href="https://www.bing.com/covid/local/florida_unitedstates">12,350</a> active cases of COVID-19 as of Monday morning, and a total of 221 fatalities associated with the virus.

Empty nurses station in hospital

Coronavirus: Hospitals Across Nation Lay Off Tens Of Thousands Of Healthcare Workers

Coronavirus

Health Care

Roger Severino, civil rights office director at the Department of Health and Human Services, has posted a bulletin warning “entities” receiving HHS funds against deciding which patients can receive treatment on the basis of discrimination, including age and disability. 
The director issued <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/03/28/ocr-issues-bulletin-on-civil-rights-laws-and-hipaa-flexibilities-that-apply-during-the-covid-19-emergency.html">the bulletin</a> in response to fears of health care shortages at hospitals in areas strongly affected by the coronavirus epidemic, a crisis that has allegedly led some hospitals in Italy to ration care away from the elderly.
“Our civil rights laws protect the equal dignity of every human life from ruthless utilitarianism,” said Severino in a press release Saturday evening. “[The Department of Health and Human Services] is committed to leaving no one behind during an emergency, and helping health care providers meet that goal.”
While hospitals across the country have not been forced to ration care, the fear of such a situation has resulted in health care providers developing contingency plans.
Medical leaders in Washington state began developing a triage document last week to create state-wide policies that would establish criteria for who would, and would not, receive treatment in the event of a health care rationing, reports <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/us/coronavirus-in-seattle-washington-state.html">The New York Times</a>.
“They look at the criteria — in this case it would likely be age and underlying disease conditions — and then determine that this person, though this person has a chance of survival with a ventilator, does not get one,” said Cassie Sauer, chief executive of the Washington State Hospital Association.
“It’s protecting the clinicians so you don’t have one person who’s kind of playing God,” Sauer told the news agency. “It is chilling, and it should not happen in America.”
After posting the discrimination bulletin, Severino told <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/coronavirus-disabilities-handicapped-rationing-ventilators-triage.html">The New York Times</a> that the warning wasn’t intended to prohibit states from developing triage contingency plans. 
Rather, Severino says his goal is to make sure “entities” begin “considering the civil rights implications of any crisis standards of care plans they may be putting into effect if it were to come to that.”
Last Thursday, a draft of a Henry Ford Health System contingency plan leaked online and revealed how the Detroit health system tentatively plans to approach patients in the event of a health care shortage.
“We currently have a public health emergency that is making our supply of some medical resources hard to find,” reads the leaked draft. “Patients who have the best chance of getting better are our first priority. Patients will be evaluated for the best plan for care and dying patients will be provided comfort care.”
The document emphasizes that the decision to remove a ventilator and provide comfort care instead will be based on the patient’s “medical condition and likelihood of getting better.” It also states the decision can be appealed by asking your individual doctor to request an evaluation from a clinical review committee.
A spokesperson for the healthcare system told <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-crisis-forces-hospitals-to-consider-rationing-treatment-11585336785">The Wall Street Journal</a> that the draft “is part of a ‘worst-case scenario’ planning document, and we are not in the worst case scenario.”
The Journal notes that states such as Oklahoma and Utah have given more leeway to individual doctors to decide on treatment plans for patients.

Waiting Room

Civil Rights Office Warns Hospitals Against Discriminatory Healthcare Rationing

COVID-19

The Democratic presidential primary has consolidated into a showdown between former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). One of the key issues on which the Democratic candidates are running is health care.
While the progressive gold standard seems to be a single-payer system, there’s a break within the party, with some preferring a more “moderate” approach to reform. Both Biden and Sanders have presented health care plans that would greatly expand the role of the federal government, and increase government spending by billions to trillions of dollars over a decade.
The “Medicare for All” plan put forth by Sanders is estimated to cost more than $32 trillion over a decade, while Biden’s plan is estimated to cost approximately $750 billion.
The Daily Wire recently spoke with health care policy expert Avik Roy about Medicare for All and the Biden plan, as well as what more conservative, free market solutions would look like. Roy is the co-founder and president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), which “conducts original research on expanding economic opportunity to those who least have it,” according to the organization’s <a href="https://freopp.org/our-mission-3b16e8e8c656">official website</a>.
In parts one and two of this interview, which you can read <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/interview-part-i-health-care-policy-expert-talks-medicare-for-all-the-so-called-moderate-alternative-and-free-market-solutions">here</a> and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/interview-part-ii-health-care-policy-expert-talks-about-what-free-market-reform-actually-looks-like">here</a>, Roy discussed what “Medicare for All” really means, the flaws of such a system, the dangers of the “moderate” counterpoint, and what a conservative solution could look like.
In part three of this interview, Roy discusses hospital monopolization, the real progress conservatives have made on health care legislation, the pressure faced by elected officials to retain the status quo, and more.
<blockquote>DW: Is there a reason that hospitals have been able to consolidate in the way that they have, and how can we break those up?
ROY: The short answer is that both at the state level and at the federal level, the people who have the authority to regulate, to block mergers that create regional monopolies, haven’t been able to do so, for one reason or another. That&#8217;s been the first-order problem. The second-order problem is even in the occasional situation where the Federal Trade Commission or related state entities have brought lawsuits, a lot of times the courts have sided with the hospital. They said, &#8220;Oh well, you&#8217;re a nonprofit hospital, therefore you must be doing the right thing. Nonprofits can do no wrong. You’re not like the greedy for-profit people.&#8221; And that&#8217;s completely wrong. Just because you are tax-exempt does not mean you can&#8217;t be greedy.
“Nonprofit” in that sense is a bit of a misnomer. So-called nonprofit hospitals are among the most rapacious practitioners of monopoly power in the hospital sector. These are huge problems. Every year that these regional monopolies gain more power, they become harder to reign in because the more power they have, the more ability they have to influence their local politicians to do whatever they want. This has become an increasing threat to the living standards of America, the fact that hospitals are charging 8% more for the same stuff that they were doing last year simply because they have the power to do so. They’re just charging more every year. At a certain point, it becomes unsustainable. In fact, it already is.
If you actually look at the share of Americans&#8217; income that they send to the IRS, and the share of Americans&#8217; income that they send to the hospital industry, they send more of their income to the hospital industry than they do to the IRS on average. That is catastrophic. So, that can&#8217;t continue. We&#8217;re starting to see, on both the Left and the Right, constructive proposals to try to reign in hospital monopolies.
DW: What are the most prominent roadblocks to the implementation of your plan?
ROY: Well, first let&#8217;s talk about the progress. There’s actually been enormous progress in terms of developing legislation that reflects these principles. Last year, Bruce Westerman, a congressman from Arkansas, introduced the Fair Care Act of 2019, which is health reform bill that&#8217;s based on all of the principles I just described. A new version of that bill is forthcoming in the next several weeks or months that will build on the Fair Care Act of 2019, and potentially attract broader support. So, there&#8217;s real progress. There’s actually a bill now that&#8217;s online, that people can look at and critique and read and think about and add ideas to. That process has led to this second version of the bill that will be coming out in the next couple of months.
That&#8217;s the good news. The good news is that there&#8217;s a lot progress being made in turning these ideas into actual legislation that members of Congress can support and advance. As you would expect, the monopolies and crony capitalists who benefit from the current system are going to fight hard at any attempt to curtail their revenue streams. And of course people on the progressive Left are going to oppose plans like this because they strengthen and expand the role of private sector innovation in solving the problems of affordability and access to care and coverage. Those would be the two groups that you could expect to not like this approach – but there&#8217;s a lot about this approach that otherwise is pretty attractive.
It&#8217;s going to be appealing to a broad segment of the public. In order to pass health reform, it&#8217;s really important to remember, we can all throw up on a blackboard our dream system of what we think the health care system should look like, but at the end of the day, if you want to pass reform in Congress, you have to get 60 votes in the Senate. To get 60 votes in the Senate, it&#8217;s not going to be an ideological fantasy of what the health care system should look like. You have to have a reform that has enough public support that it can attract 60 votes in the Senate, and that means attracting some Democrats. Not all, but some.
The approach that we&#8217;ve designed is meant to do that. It&#8217;s meant to say, &#8220;This represents a gradual evolution of the system. It does deploy the private sector to do it, but it also achieves goals that moderate Democrats should appreciate, which is more people will be able to afford their health insurance, and there will be fewer people who will be uninsured.&#8221;
DW: Republicans don&#8217;t seem to be unifying around and really heavily promoting an alternative to what&#8217;s being offered by the other side. Why do you think that is? Is it pressure from monopolistic organizations?
ROY: There’s obviously partisan pressure to do partisan things, particularly if you&#8217;re running for president in the Democratic primary, or running for Congress in the Democratic primary. You&#8217;re going to want to do things that enable you to win that primary, so that&#8217;s going to be a more partisan ideological approach. The same is often true, obviously, in Republican primaries. The other piece of it, as you suggested, is that if you want to get elected, it&#8217;s easier to get elected if you don&#8217;t offend the powerful industry interests that otherwise could run a lot of ads claiming you&#8217;re a bad guy or bad gal.
So, don&#8217;t make waves, don&#8217;t really disrupt the status quo in terms of the crony capitalists, and that increases your chances of winning. The formula is to talk big, but not really actually do a lot to tackle hospital monopolies or other monopolies of crony capitalists, because if you really mean it, then you&#8217;re going to have those industry components and sectors against you. That&#8217;s what happened with Bernie. If Bernie had been the nominee, he would have elicited a lot of opposition from the industries that make a lot more money under the status quo than they would under Bernie&#8217;s plan, in theory.
That’s kind of the dynamic right now, but after the election, we&#8217;ll see. If Trump wins, then there are going to be more Democrats willing to come to the table and say, &#8220;Okay, we didn&#8217;t succeed in getting a Democratic president, but I still want to do work on health reforms. Let&#8217;s work together.&#8221; If Biden or some Democrat wins, and they&#8217;re approach fails to get through Congress, that could also elicit more interest in a bipartisan approach. So, the more partisan approaches have to fail for people to be willing to come to the table. That&#8217;s kind of what&#8217;s happened with Republicans.
Repeal and Replace failed, so there&#8217;s much more interest in what I&#8217;m describing in terms of a more gradual evolution to a better system. Similarly, I think the Medicare for All and public option type approaches have to fail for there to be more interest in a bipartisan approach.
DW: Is there anything that we haven&#8217;t touched on in this interview that you would want our readership to know about this particular issue?
ROY: Yeah, I would say that we haven&#8217;t really talked about what the Trump administration has already done, and what Republicans in the Senate are already trying to do to address some of these issues.
We talked about the Fair Care Act of Bruce Westerman, which is, I think, the most wide-ranging and ambitious and important attempt to achieve free market health reform, but it&#8217;s also worth nothing that there are things on a more incremental level that both the White House and the Senate are trying to do that would be helpful. The Trump administration has been trying to do a lot of work on price transparency. That could do a lot to benefit patients and businesses that are trying to keep their healthcare costs down.
The Senate Finance Committee has been doing some important work in trying to reduce Medicare spending on drugs in ways that I think are really constructive. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee – the Senate health committee led by Senator Lamar Alexander – is trying to do some good work to combat anti-competitive practices by hospital monopolies and others.
So, those are not the total solution, they wouldn&#8217;t on their own achieve free market health care, but they&#8217;re important reforms that your readers should be aware of and, in my view, get behind.</blockquote>
I’d like to thank Avik Roy for taking the time to speak about such an important issue. For more information, you can follow him on <a href="https://twitter.com/Avik?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">Twitter</a> or visit the FREOPP website <a href="https://freopp.org/the-freopp-founders-avik-roy-53719dfcaf05">here</a>.

Healthcare.

INTERVIEW (Part III): Health Care Policy Expert Talks About Free Market Options, Cronyism, Monopolies, And Progress Already Being Made

Avik Roy

Bernie Sanders

Joe Biden

Medicare for All

The Democratic presidential primary has consolidated into a showdown between former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). One of the key issues on which the Democratic candidates are running is health care.
While the progressive gold standard seems to be a single-payer system, there’s a break within the party, with some preferring a more “moderate” approach to reform. Both Biden and Sanders have presented health care plans that would greatly expand the role of the federal government, and increase government spending by billions to trillions of dollars over a decade.
The “Medicare for All” plan put forth by Sanders is estimated to cost more than $32 trillion over a decade, while Biden’s plan is estimated to cost approximately $750 billion.
The Daily Wire recently spoke with health care policy expert Avik Roy about Medicare for All and the Biden plan, as well as what more conservative, free market solutions would look like. Roy is the co-founder and president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), which “conducts original research on expanding economic opportunity to those who least have it,” according to the organization’s <a href="https://freopp.org/our-mission-3b16e8e8c656">official website</a>.
In part one of this three-part interview, which you can read <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/interview-part-i-health-care-policy-expert-talks-medicare-for-all-the-so-called-moderate-alternative-and-free-market-solutions">here</a>, Roy discussed what “Medicare for All” really means, the flaws of such a system, the dangers of the “moderate” counterpoint, and if a nation can achieve so-called universal coverage without a health care mandate.
In part two, Roy talks about how the current health care system in the United States is neither free market nor government-run, and what a conservative solution could look like.
<blockquote>DW: Can you describe the United States health care system as it compares to a free market system versus a much more regulated system? Are we not somewhere in between?
ROY: That’s exactly right, we&#8217;re somewhere in between. We&#8217;re not a 100% public system, and we&#8217;re not a 100% private system. We&#8217;re somewhere in between. Roughly half of all health expenditures – and actually more if you define it in certain ways – are paid for by the taxpayer through taxes and spending. It&#8217;s more like two-thirds of all health care spending in America is public spending if you include the value of the exclusion from taxation of employer-sponsored coverage, which is effectively a form of subsidy for that kind of coverage. So, if you put all that together, it&#8217;s like two-thirds. If you don&#8217;t include the tax expenditures, it&#8217;s more like half. The government’s role in health care in America is considerable and growing all the time. It’s a misperception out there that the American health care system is a free market system, and European countries are all socialists. That&#8217;s not true at all. There are countries in Europe that are much more market-oriented than the United States.
In fact, at FREOPP, we&#8217;re doing some research on this topic, really trying to identify which countries have the most market-oriented systems, and which ones have the most socialized. We&#8217;re coming to an analysis that suggests that there&#8217;s somewhere around a half dozen countries that are more market-oriented than the United States. The most notable example is Switzerland. In Switzerland, you have a system in which everybody has private insurance. There are not government insurers, there are no public options, there&#8217;s no Medicare, there&#8217;s no Medicaid. Everyone buys private insurance. There is an individual mandate in Switzerland, and in terms of our own health reform proposals, we are opposed to an individual mandate.
In Switzerland, it&#8217;s all individual private insurance. Everyone shops for their own coverage much like we do in Medicare Advantage, and that coverage is subsidized for people in the bottom fifth of the spectrum in terms of income, illness, and things like that. So, it&#8217;s a pretty good system that&#8217;s much more fiscally sustainable than ours, and where everyone has universal coverage. That&#8217;s an example of the model that we can look to and say, &#8220;Hey, if you want to achieve universal coverage, you don&#8217;t have to go the socialist route. You can actually go the market-based route. You can learn from Medicare Advantage, you can learn from Switzerland.&#8221; That&#8217;s why at FREOPP, our health reform plan is called “Medicare Advantage for All,” because we really want to highlight that Medicare Advantage is a great model for thinking about how to expand coverage in an affordable way.
DW: What is the conservative solution to healthcare? What are the tentpole ideas of the solution to what we have now?
ROY: First of all, it&#8217;s very important to embrace the concept of universal coverage. I think too often conservatives have fallen into the trap of saying that just because the Left supports a certain policy outcome, we must be against it. That doesn&#8217;t make any sense because if you are a true believer in free enterprise, if you are a true believer in capitalism, you know that it’s free enterprise and free markets that have led to almost everyone in America being able to have a job, to almost every American having a smart phone, to almost every American being able to afford a laptop. These things are possible because of free market innovation and competition.
So, if we believe that free market innovation and competition can make those kinds of services cheaper and more accessible and more abundant and more available to every American, why don&#8217;t we think the same about health care? We should. We should understand that it&#8217;s actually free enterprise that does the best job of delivering affordable health insurance to every American.
Using that as our philosophical premise, we start by saying we should embrace the cause of universal coverage, and show how markets can achieve it. So, how would markets achieve it? The simple answer is, we should learn from Medicare Advantage. The irony of Bernie Sanders talking about “Medicare for All” is that if you look at the Medicare program today, from 15 years ago to now, there has been zero growth in the number of people enrolled in the single-payer component of the Medicare program.
All the growth and enrollment in Medicare has come from private insurance, from the Medicare Advantage program. Why is that? Because the private insurers have shown that they can deliver the benefits of the Medicare program at a lower cost, on average about 10% less expensive than the traditional government-run Medicare program. They&#8217;ve gotten so much more efficient that they&#8217;re now adding extra benefits like vision care and dental care on top of the traditional Medicare benefits – and prescription drug coverage. So, you&#8217;re getting a lot more benefits at a lower cost.
Every year, the gap between private plans under Medicare Advantage and the single-payer or government-run approach under the traditional Medicare widens. Our concept, what we propose, is to learn from that, to offer more affordable options to people elsewhere who are under the age of 65.
We basically describe “Medicare Advantage for All” with four core principles. The first is that you have to have a system that&#8217;s affordable for every generation. What do I mean by that? It means that we haven&#8217;t solved the problem if we&#8217;ve made health care and health insurance affordable for the Americans living today, but made the system fiscally unsustainable for future generations. It&#8217;s incredibly important to do both, to make health care affordable for those who need it today, but also make health care and health insurance affordable for the taxpayers of tomorrow. That’s number one because if we have a system we can&#8217;t afford, either today or tomorrow, we haven&#8217;t solved anything.
Principle number two is to have personalized insurance and personalized options. Milton Friedman famously wrote a book called “Free to Choose,” and that is an essential principle of market-based health reform, that all Americans should have the freedom to choose among a wide variety of plans that suit their needs. So, under Medicare for All, you have no choices, you just have the government0-run plan, so-called Medicare for All. Under the current system, under the status quo American system, very few Americans actually have a choice in the way they get their health insurance.
If you&#8217;re in Medicaid, you&#8217;re basically handed a government-assigned plan. If you get insurance from your employer, yes, it&#8217;s a private insurance plan, but you didn&#8217;t choose it – some HR bureaucrat at your company chose it, and imposed it on you whether or not that&#8217;s a good plan for you. That&#8217;s not a choice. And a lot of people who are in the Medicare program are basically in a single-payer system where they don&#8217;t have any choice. All Americans should have the freedom to choose among a wide variety of private plans, just like they can in the Medicare Advantage program. That&#8217;s a core element of our approach.
The next element is fairness to taxpayers. What does that mean? That means that to the degree that we publicly finance our health care system, those taxpayer revenues must be as focused as possible on the vulnerable population. The sick, people with pre-existing conditions, people with birth defects, and childhood genetic disorders, and the very poor and the disabled. Not the wealthy.
One of the things that&#8217;s most wrong with our system today is that you and I pay taxes so that the wealthiest Americans – millionaires and billionaires, to borrow a phrase – can have government-subsidized insurance. Why is it that steel workers and truck drivers are asked to pay taxes so that millionaires and billionaires can have government-subsidized health insurance? That&#8217;s insane, and that&#8217;s something we absolutely have to reform. If we do that, we can save an enormous amount of money in terms of the deficits and debt, and what we spend on health care without threatening coverage for anyone.
The fourth point is innovation and competition for patients. What we&#8217;re talking about there is the rise of monopoly power, and crony capitalism in the U.S. The problem of crony capitalism and monopolies that both extract favors form the government and extract monopoly prices from patients is a huge problem in the United States – and they go together because regional monopolies, like a regional hospital monopoly, has incredible power not only to charge higher prices to patients, but also to lobby their congressman and say, &#8220;Hey, we control a lot of the economy in this district and we control a lot of jobs in this district, and unless you do what we want, we will scream bloody murder.&#8221;
A lot of congressmen and state legislators cave into that. That’s a huge problem. We&#8217;ve got to do more to curtail the power of monopolies to raise prices on patients, and also because monopolies prevent the rise of innovation. You have to have competition in order to have a more innovative system.
Competition is really important for reducing prices and also for increasing quality and increasing innovation. Innovation and competition for patients is essential. Monopolies are not the solution. Again, there are a lot of people in conservative and Republican circles who are confused about this. They say, “If it’s a monopoly, but it&#8217;s a private sector monopoly, that&#8217;s okay.” What we&#8217;re arguing is that monopolies are bad regardless of whether they&#8217;re private sector monopolies or government sponsored monopolies. If you really want a market-based system, you actually have to have a market, and having a market means that you have to have choices as to where you get your care and your coverage.</blockquote>
In part three of this interview, which will be released on Sunday, Roy discusses hospital monopolization, the real progress that conservatives have made on health care legislation, the pressures faced by elected officials to retain the status quo, and more.
I’d like to thank Avik Roy for taking the time to speak about such an important issue. For more information, you can follow him on <a href="https://twitter.com/Avik?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">Twitter</a> or visit the FREOPP website <a href="https://freopp.org/the-freopp-founders-avik-roy-53719dfcaf05">here</a>.

Nurse

INTERVIEW (Part II): Health Care Policy Expert Talks About What Free Market Reform Actually Looks Like

The Democratic presidential primary has consolidated into a showdown between former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). One of the key issues on which the Democratic candidates are running is health care.
While the progressive gold standard seems to be a single-payer system, there’s a break within the party, with some preferring a more “moderate” approach to reform. Both Biden and Sanders have presented health care plans that would greatly expand the role of the federal government, and increase government spending by billions to trillions of dollars over a decade.
The “Medicare for All” plan put forth by Sanders is estimated to cost more than $32 trillion over a decade, while Biden’s plan is estimated to cost approximately $750 billion.
The Daily Wire recently spoke with health care policy expert Avik Roy about Medicare for All and the Biden plan, as well as what more conservative, free market solutions would look like. Roy is the co-founder and president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), which “conducts original research on expanding economic opportunity to those who least have it,” according to the organization’s <a href="https://freopp.org/our-mission-3b16e8e8c656">official website</a>.
In part one of this three-part interview, Roy discusses what “Medicare for All” really means, the flaws of such a system, the dangers of the “moderate” counterpoint, and if a nation can achieve so-called universal coverage without a health care mandate.
<blockquote>DW: Medicare for All has become kind of the gold standard for progressives, despite Bernie losing some currency in the race as of Super Tuesday and beyond. What are the major flaws of such a system?
ROY: Well, before we get to the flaws, I think it&#8217;s important to actually define what so-called “Medicare for All” is, because when pollsters ask questions about whether people support Medicare for All, the polls make it clear that people don&#8217;t actually understand what it is. So, let&#8217;s define what Medicare for All is or at least – I always put quotes around “Medicare for All” because it&#8217;s not actually Medicare for All, what Bernie Sanders is proposing. More than a third of the people enrolled in the Medicare program today have private insurance through a program called Medicare Advantage, which is a robust, competitive market-based program to give seniors the coverage they need.
That would be abolished under what Bernie Sanders and others call “Medicare for All.” Under what they call Medicare for all, all private insurance would be abolished. So, it would end Medicare as we know it first and foremost because nearly 40% of all seniors are enrolled in private plans in Medicare today. That&#8217;s just for the Medicare physician and hospital benefit. Even more seniors, almost all seniors, enroll in private plans to offer prescription drug coverage through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act. That would also be abolished under the Bernie Sanders plan. So, if what Bernie calls “Medicare for All” were enacted, Medicare as we know it would be wiped out. It would be repealed and replaced by an entirely new program in which there is no room for private insurance.
That&#8217;s really important to understand, that what Bernie and the Left call “Medicare for All” would repeal and replace Medicare along with Obamacare, and the employer-based market, and everything else about our healthcare system. So, it is truly a dramatic, if not a radical, departure from the system we have. It does not resemble Medicare in its current form.
On the polling side, when you ask voters what do they understand the term “Medicare for All” to mean, the vast majority understand it to mean that if somebody is uninsured or they don&#8217;t have an affordable option to get their coverage, they&#8217;d have an option that resembles Medicare. And because overwhelming majorities of Americans want every American to have health insurance – just like we want every American to have a good public school education – people support that. People support every American having affordable health insurance. Again, that is not what Medicare for All is. Medicare for All is not an option for people to buy affordable coverage if they don&#8217;t have any affordable options today; it’s a removal of options, because any choice you have today in your insurance care, it would be eliminated under “Medicare for All.” Instead of having more affordable options, you would have only one option, the government run option, and that option would be not necessarily more affordable than what you had before.
The two most important gaps between what is described as “Medicare for All” and the reality of single-payer health care is one, that under Medicare today, most seniors have some form of private coverage whether it&#8217;s through Medicare Advantage or the Medicare prescription drug program – and those options would be abolished. Two, it&#8217;s important that people understand that Medicare for All is not the same thing as what Bernie is describing as “Medicare for All.”
DW: What are the primary flaws of Sanders’ system, or something like “Medicare for all who want it,” which was proposed by former candidate Pete Buttigieg?
ROY: The first is that the plan that Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others have put out there would basically make healthcare &#8220;free&#8221; at the point of care. There would be no premiums, no co-pays, no deductibles. You could basically go to the doctor, go to the hospital, get any kind of healthcare service you want, and the government would pay for it. That&#8217;s the theory.
Of course, if you set up that kind of system, you create a health care system that&#8217;s the equivalent of me at an open bar at an in-law&#8217;s wedding, where I&#8217;m going to consume everything and anything that I can pull off the shelf because it&#8217;s free to me. So, what you see in every single-payer system, particularly the British system and the Canadian system, is that there are massive restrictions on access to care, and heavily regulated prices and controls on prices of care.
Because otherwise, if you just have a system where everyone can consume any health care they want and they don&#8217;t have to pay a bill, you&#8217;re just going to have massive over-utilization of the health care system, and prices can go up because if you&#8217;re a hospital or a doctor or a drug company, you can charge whatever you want and pass the bill off to the taxpayer. That&#8217;s a great model for the health care industry, but it&#8217;s not a great model for the taxpayer. What most rational single-payer systems do is ration care. They say, &#8220;We are going to make it free on the front end, but we&#8217;re going to restrict your ability to use the health care system so that we don&#8217;t go broke.&#8221;
And Sanders&#8217; plan doesn&#8217;t really account for that. It tries to have the “free Christmas tree for everybody,” but tries to minimize, from a political standpoint, how the plan would restrict access to care or restrict payments to hospitals and doctors, because Bernie understands that those details are politically problematic.
It would result in massive increases in taxes, and that would also be controversial. So, those are the various ways in which single-payer is problematic and even unworkable. That’s why, frankly, I think it has been a mistake for conservatives to spend all their energy debating single-payer. Single-payer is bad. If Republicans were to ever run against a Democratic nominee who was a genuine advocate of single-payer, I think that would be pretty clearly expressed.
I think what conservatives and Republicans have done a pretty bad job of doing is really thinking through things that are more incremental than single-payer, but are also things that restrict human freedom and may increase costs in the healthcare system.
DW: Such as?
ROY: Well, let&#8217;s talk about the Biden plan. Joe Biden&#8217;s plan is not a “Medicare for All” plan. If we’re spending all this time talking about Medicare for All, and Medicare for All is not really what’s mainstream in the political conversation, even among Democrats, then the utility of that discussion is somewhat lower. What&#8217;s really important to discuss is what Joe Biden wants to do, which is much more reflective of, let&#8217;s call it the Democratic establishment, or the center-left Democratic establishment.
To oversimplify, there are two major components to Joe Biden&#8217;s health reform plan. One is a $750 billion bailout of Obamacare. As we all know, Obamacare has doubled or tripled health insurance premiums, particularly for younger and healthier people who need to buy insurance on the ACA exchanges. Biden doesn&#8217;t want to reform the dumb regulations that have driven those premiums upward; instead, he wants to ask taxpayers to spend another $750 billion over the next decade to paper over those mistakes.
That is a much more serious threat, I guess you could say, or policy probability, than single-payer health care. Single-payer health care, the Bernie plan, would increase federal spending by $38 trillion, give or take a few trillion, over ten years. The Biden plan is considerably smaller in scope relative to the Bernie plan. It would increase federal spending by about $750 billion over ten years. So that&#8217;s something like 50 times smaller than the Bernie plan in it&#8217;s ambition, but $750 billion is still a lot of money. Obamacare spent $2 trillion over ten years trying to cover the uninsured. So, $750 billion is a lot, especially when you consider the net spending of Obamacare.
Because Obama also cut Medicare spending by $800 billion over ten years to fund that coverage expense, the net spending increase of Obamacare is more like $1.2 trillion over ten years. So, Joe Biden&#8217;s plan is comparable in scale to Obamacare, at least fiscally, in terms of what it would do to paper over the rising premiums that Obamacare caused.
So, that&#8217;s much more important for liberty-oriented people to consider because it&#8217;s the kind of plan that is now described as the “moderate plan.” The “responsible, pragmatic, moderate” plan on the Democratic side is to increase federal spending by $750 billion over the next ten years.
DW: Is there any successful health care system anywhere in the developed world that does not offer universal coverage or include an insurance mandate?
ROY: “Mandatory” is a complex topic actually in the context of the international discussion of health care. For example, if you&#8217;re in the U.K. system, it&#8217;s not mandatory that you sign up for health care under the NHS, but your taxes go to pay for it. The analogy is – and this is true of a lot of single-payer systems in particular – it&#8217;s a lot like what we do in America for public schools. We all pay property taxes and sometimes income taxes to pay for the cost of public school, but not every American sends their kids to public school.
But the parents that send their kids to private school are still paying the taxes to send their kids to public school. So, is that mandatory or is it not? Because you&#8217;re not being mandated to go to public school, but you&#8217;re being mandated to finance public school.
The way a lot of European systems work is like that, where you&#8217;re mandated to pay taxes to fund the public system, but you&#8217;re not mandated to participate in the public system – and that varies among countries. The British NHS is on one end of this in terms of really trying to steer you or pressure you to participate in the public system. On the other end of the spectrum are countries like Australia. In Australia, there&#8217;s a public system that works exactly like American public schools, where everybody pays taxes to pay for the public system, but a considerable proportion of Australians opt to buy private insurance to have access to private hospitals and private doctors.
So, the answer is yes. You can achieve universal coverage without a mandate.
Not every country has a mandate for you to participate in a public system, but universal coverage does involve taxes that are used to finance the public system. By the way, that&#8217;s true in America, too. Everyone who pays taxes pays taxes to fund the public health care system. If you&#8217;ve ever received a paycheck, it includes something called FICA taxes, which go to fund the Social Security trust fund and the Medicare trust fund. So, every single one of us who has taken a job of any kind has paid taxes to finance public health care in America. In that sense, America is not that different from a lot of those other countries. So, I do think you can say that there are countries that have achieved universal coverage without a mandate.
A lot of it depends on how you define “universal coverage.” Does universal coverage mean that every single person has health insurance? 100% enrollment? Is that universal coverage? That&#8217;s not actually how most scholars define universal coverage. Most scholars define universal coverage as everybody in the country having access to an affordable option for health insurance. Even in the Medicare program – which Bernie Sanders would call universal coverage for the elderly, and most of us would too – 2% of seniors don&#8217;t sign up for one reason or another. There are a small minority of people who don&#8217;t actually participate in Medicare.
So, if you define universal coverage in that way, saying it may not be that every single person has health insurance, but every single person has the opportunity to buy reasonably affordable health insurance, we can definitely get there without a mandate.</blockquote>
In part two of this interview, which will be released later today, Roy talks about how the current health care system in the United States is neither free market nor government-run, and what a conservative solution could look like.
I’d like to thank Avik Roy for taking the time to speak about such an important issue. For more information, you can follow him on <a href="https://twitter.com/Avik?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">Twitter</a> or visit the FREOPP website <a href="https://freopp.org/the-freopp-founders-avik-roy-53719dfcaf05">here</a>.

Avik Roy of FREOPP

INTERVIEW (Part I): Health Care Policy Expert Talks ‘Medicare For All,’ The So-Called ‘Moderate’ Alternative, And Free Market Solutions

Free market

Sen. Bernie Sanders said: &#8220;I believe that health care is a right of all people.&#8221; He&#8217;s not alone in that contention. That claim comes from Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives. It is not just a health care right that people claim. There are &#8220;rights&#8221; to decent housing, decent food, a decent job and prescription drugs. In a free and moral society, do people have these rights? Let&#8217;s begin by asking ourselves: What is a right?
In the standard usage of the term, a &#8220;right&#8221; is something that exists simultaneously among people. In the case of our U.S. Constitutional decree, we have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our individual right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness imposes no obligation upon another other than the duty of noninterference.
As such, a right imposes no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech is something we all possess simultaneously. My right to free speech imposes no obligation upon another except that of noninterference. Similarly, I have a right to travel freely. Again, that right imposes no obligation upon another except that of noninterference.
Sanders&#8217; claim that health care is a right does impose obligations upon others. We see that by recognizing that there is no Santa Claus or tooth fairy who gives resources to government to pay for medical services. Moreover, the money does not come from congressmen and state legislators reaching into their own pockets to pay for the service. That means that in order for government to provide medical services to someone who cannot afford it, it must use intimidation, threats and coercion to take the earnings of another American to provide that service.
Let&#8217;s apply this bogus concept of rights to my right to speak and travel freely. In the case of my right to free speech, it might impose obligations on others to supply me with an auditorium, microphone and audience. It may require newspapers or television stations to allow me to use their property to express my views. My right to travel freely might require that others provide me with resources to purchase airplane tickets and hotel accommodations. What if I were to demand that others make sacrifices so that I can exercise my free speech and travel rights, I suspect that most Americans would say, &#8220;Williams, you have rights to free speech and you have a right to travel freely, but I&#8217;m not obligated to pay for them!&#8221;
A moral vision of rights does not mean that we should not help our fellow man in need. It means that helping with health care needs to be voluntary (i.e., free market decisions or voluntary donations to charities that provide health care.) The government&#8217;s role in health care is to protect this individual right to choose. As Senator Rand Paul was brave enough to say, &#8220;The basic assumption that you have a right to get something from somebody else means you have to endorse the concept of theft.&#8221;
Statists go further to claim that people have a &#8220;right&#8221; to housing, to a job, to an education, to an affordable wage. These so-called rights impose burdens on others in the form of involuntary servitude. If one person has a right to something he did not earn, it means that another person does not have a right to something he did earn.
The provision by the U.S. Congress of a so-called right to health care should offend any sense of moral decency. If you&#8217;re a Christian or a Jew, you should be against the notion of one American living at the expense of another. When God gave Moses the Eighth Commandment — &#8220;Thou shalt not steal&#8221; — I am sure that He did not mean, &#8220;Thou shalt not steal — unless there is a majority vote in the U.S. Congress.&#8221;
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Medicare for All sign

WILLIAMS: Rights Versus Wishes

Free Speech

human rights

Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) made a recent appearance on &#8220;The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon&#8221; where he cited the current spread of the coronavirus as a perfect example of why America needs a single-payer health care system.
&#8220;We should talk about coronavirus if you don&#8217;t mind, I watch the news, I read the news, and I just don&#8217;t know who to really trust,&#8221; Jimmy Fallon said to Bernie Sanders.
The socialist senator from Vermont then used the moment to paint President Trump as being &#8220;anti-science,&#8221; while criticizing his decision to appoint Vice President Mike Pence as head of the task force.
&#8220;That is the problem we have today, we have a president who is anti-science, doesn&#8217;t believe in the reality of climate change, who has appointed Mike Pence, who is also not known to be much of a scientist, to lead the task force,&#8221; said Sanders. &#8220;Clearly, at this moment, you need somebody who you can trust who is going to bring together the best scientists, doctors, researchers, work with the entire world, to do everything that we can to halt this terrible pandemic.&#8221;
&#8220;And I think there are clearly some things we need to do right away,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;The idea that we have so many people in this country, the only country on earth, major country, that doesn&#8217;t guarantee healthcare to all people, we have to make sure that everybody, right now, feels free when you’re sick to go to a doctor, regardless of your income.&#8221;
Sanders then segued into a major pitch for single-payer, government-run healthcare.
&#8220;And you know what? The government will pay that bill,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Number two, we are the only major country on Earth not to guarantee paid medical leave. If you can believe it, there are people who are sick today, who may actually believe they have symptoms of the coronavirus, who are going to work because they have no income. &#8230; We have got to do what every other country on Earth does and guarantee paid family and medical leave, and do it right now on an emergency basis.&#8221;
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As noted by Christopher Jacobs at <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/10/no-bernie-sanders-single-payer-wouldnt-eliminate-the-coronavirus-outbreak/">The Federalist</a>, a single-payer healthcare system would not exactly be a panacea, considering that Bernie was essentially echoing recent claims made by Britain&#8217;s Jeremy Corbyn regarding the coronavirus outbreak:
<blockquote>Yesterday, our part-time prime minister finally published the steps that his government will take to tackle the outbreak of the disease. The strategy broadly has our support, but a decade of Tory austerity means that our national health service is already struggling to cope. Bed-occupancy levels are at 94% and hundreds of our most vulnerable people are being treated on trolleys in corridors. What additional funding will our overstretched and underfunded NHS be given to deal with this crisis?</blockquote>
On Wednesday night, President Trump spoke from the Oval Office where he announced &#8220;several strong but necessary actions&#8221; to combat the coronavirus, which has now begun to hurt the American economy. One of his top actions included ensuring that &#8220;working Americans impacted by the virus can stay home without fear of financial hardship.&#8221;

Sanders on Fallon

WATCH: Bernie Sanders Says Coronavirus Shows Why U.S. Needs Single-Payer Healthcare

2020 Election

Senator Chuck Schumer&#8217;s threats against Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch on the steps of the Supreme Court yesterday were clearly meant to be physical intimidation. His spokesman now claims Schumer&#8217;s warning that the named justices would &#8220;pay a price,&#8221; &#8220;reap the whirlwind,&#8221; and &#8220;not know what hit them,&#8221; was referring to political backlash. But members of the nation&#8217;s highest court are, by design, insulated from political backlash. They aren&#8217;t elected. They can&#8217;t be kicked out of office for issuing an unpopular opinion. So if he wasn&#8217;t referring to a political price – and he couldn&#8217;t have been – then we must ask ourselves: what other sort of price can a public figure be made to pay by an enraged mob? It&#8217;s not hard to connect the dots. Schumer was attempting to intimidate sitting Supreme Court justices, to make them feel physically unsafe, so that they would decide a case how he prefers. That is not only disgraceful but illegal, and he should be arrested and charged.
The rest of the abortion enthusiasts rallying in D.C. have not behaved much better. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) <a href="https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1235377676371845123?s=20">launched</a> into one of her patented spittle-flecked rants, shouting that pro-lifers &#8220;shouldn&#8217;t want to have sex&#8221; with her. On that point, I expect broad bipartisan support. A woman who calls herself &#8220;the Beyonce of abortion storytelling&#8221; (which presumably means she lip-syncs her speeches) <a href="https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1235313000162217987?s=20">bragged</a> about having killed her child, and encouraged the crowd to applaud all women who&#8217;ve had abortions. She was rather explicitly celebrating abortion, even as pro-aborts claim that nobody celebrates abortion. This is what we&#8217;ve come to expect from that side. They do and say things while insisting that nobody does or says the very things they are currently doing and saying.
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The actress Busy Phillips <a href="https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1235642093713924098">vowed</a> to never stop talking about her abortion, of which she is very proud because it helped further her D-list career. Is there anything sadder than someone who trades in their soul and their child for bit parts on &#8220;Drunk History&#8221; and &#8220;Cougar Town&#8221;? Bizarrely, she also promised to continue shouting from the rooftops about her &#8220;periods&#8221; and her &#8220;yeast infections.&#8221; It is not clear what yeast infections have to do with anything or why any sane person would bring them up, unsolicited, in front of an audience. But this is likewise to be expected. The mark of a modern feminist is that she loves to speak in graphic terms about her body and its functions, and she also wants you to know that all of the things she&#8217;s telling you, which you didn&#8217;t ask or want to hear about, are none of your business.
But we can&#8217;t allow the reason for these hysterics to get lost in the mayhem. The pro-abortion rage mob and its ringleaders weren&#8217;t mobilized by a case that threatens to overturn Roe v. Wade. In fact, the case at issue does not have any direct bearing on abortion rights at all. June Medical Services v. Russo stems from a lawsuit brought by abortionists against the state of Louisiana over a law that would require abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. The point is to protect women who <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430793/">suffer serious complications</a> during an abortion procedure. The law would ensure that the abortion-injured patient can be admitted directly to a hospital and receive the potentially life-saving treatment she needs. In Louisiana, all ambulatory surgical centers are required to have admitting privileges. This is a very normal regulation that many types of medical clinics all over the country must comply with. If abortion is health care, and abortion clinics are health care facilities, there should be no objection to state laws that treat them accordingly.
Of course, in keeping with the theme, abortion proponents want to have their <a href="https://www.lifenews.com/2019/06/04/miley-cyrus-thinks-licking-a-cake-will-make-you-support-abortion/">abortion cake</a>, and eat it too. They want to present child murder as a legitimate medical procedure while reserving the right to go into spasms of fury if anyone proposes a law that treats abortion as a legitimate medical procedure. That&#8217;s because abortion, for them, isn&#8217;t so much medicinal as it is sacramental. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) was telling the truth when she <a href="https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1232363356213981184?s=20">linked</a> abortion with &#8220;religious freedom.&#8221; No law, policy, regulation, or limitation may get within a thousand miles of the sacred ritual. They will defend unlimited abortions with the same satanic enthusiasm that the Aztecs defended their temples of human sacrifice from the Spanish invaders. All decency and dignity goes out the window. The idol must be protected at all costs. That is what we are witnessing in D.C. this week.

Abortion protest

WALSH: With Their Freak Out In D.C. This Week, Abortion Proponents Have Admitted That Abortion Isn’t Health Care 

Abortion

Charles Schumer

Supreme Court

When I first began to read, listen to, and watch political commentary, and identify my position on the socio-political spectrum, I felt a great passion about numerous issues. I was young, and the fire burned brightly. A decade and a half later, I’ve slowly come to realize that passion can act as a sort of cataract to political decision-making.
It’s entirely reasonable and even appropriate to feel passionately about certain political issues – after all, without passion, we would have little motivation to engage in politics at all. That said, we must be keenly aware of the ways in which our fervor is influencing our ideology as it pertains to the way in which we would like to see things be accomplished.
There are two apt examples that illustrate the poison of passion – one on the Left and one on the Right.
The debate about how the health care system can be fixed has raged for decades, and despite some disruptive changes, e.g. the Affordable Care Act, little has actually been accomplished for good or ill.
Groups on both sides have their arguments locked and loaded, and are so settled into what they perceive to be the truth that no amount of data or reasoning will break their line of thinking. As a self-identified conservatarian, I have a set of ideas based on my conversations with several experts, as well as what I believe to be a logical assessment of the data set before me, of how to reform the health care system in such a way as to improve quality and make it both more affordable and accessible.
What I have tried to do is allow new information and perspectives to inform my ideology so long as such information and perspectives stand up to scrutiny. This has led to moments of evolution in the way I view the means by which the health care system can be made more effective. In other words, I have worked diligently to keep passion from infecting my perspective to the extent that I would not countenance information that challenged my ideology as it’s currently framed.
I have not always been successful, having on several occasions dug my heels in when my desire to be “right” meant more to me than understanding the issue more fully.
Setting aside politicians, many of whom seem to be driven not by a craving for solutions but by an appetite for votes, I believe that the average progressive American is just as motivated to find solutions as their counterparts on the other end of the political spectrum – they have simply allowed passion to infect their perception, leading to the formation of blind spots.
Progressive Americans want to see the less fortunate have access to health care, they don’t want surprise medical bills sending families to the brink of bankruptcy, they want more affordable medications for chronic medical problems, among other things. None of these wants are bad. In fact, they are the exact opposite.
Conservatives want very similar things. Where good faith progressives and conservatives diverge is over the “how” of it all. Progressives generally believe that government intervention is how these things can be appropriately achieved. Conservatives generally believe that deregulation and the free market is the answer.
Watching the health care discussion as it occurs during the Democratic primary process is illustrative of the idea that passion often overrides common sense. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has proposed a “Medicare for All” plan that would, according to him, provide every American with “free” access to health care. He admits that middle-class taxes would increase, but claims that the positive impact outweighs the higher taxes. The estimated cost of the plan is approximately $32 trillion over a decade.
Whether Sanders is a genuine believer is unimportant in this case. Supporters of the senator, as well as supporters of other candidates offering similar plans featuring massive increases in government spending and scope, have been essentially blinded by their passion for the issue. They see an opportunity to accomplish a desired good, and are blinded to the negative externalities.
However, the negative externalities of such a plan are numerous – the elimination of private care, untenable increases in government spending, allowing the federal government full control over an extraordinarily large, multifaceted industry. These initial negatives are only exacerbated by what would follow. As can be seen in other nations that have nationalized or semi-nationalized systems, giving the government control over the health care industry inevitably leads to access burdens, ballooning costs, subpar care, talent loss, and innovation shrinkage.
Because of this blind fervor, supporters of nationalized health care cannot properly assess, with any intellectual vigor, the pros and cons of the situation. If they were able to look at the issue with dispassion, they could engage with those who do not support such a plan, and work toward a meaningful, effective, and feasible solution.
But since passion has coated their eyes, they have lost all depth of perspective, and can only push out talking points crafted by progressive politicians. They cannot reach any deeper, or wrestle with information that doesn’t comport with their established worldview. This is why when pressed, they often become angry or indignant. They cannot fathom the notion that someone wouldn’t see the world as they do. They are ill prepared for such a confrontation because they haven’t taken the time to learn to articulate their point of view, and the only option left is to short-circuit.
Dispassion could alleviate this ideological rigidity.
On the Right, there is a similar rigidity when it comes to President Donald Trump. Prior to the 2016 nomination of Trump, there was a divide among Republicans as to who was the best choice to represent conservative values in the general election against Hillary Clinton.
Conservatives of all stripes had their favorites. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), and even former Ohio Governor John Kasich were favorited by different segments of the Republican Party. Many individuals who supported these candidates saw Donald Trump as a cruel, unstable, ideologically chaotic narcissist.
After Trump won the November 2016 election, there was a small band of conservatives who dug their nails in. They didn’t support Trump during the general, and they weren’t going to support him as president. These people are known colloquially as “Never Trumpers.” It doesn’t matter if some of the president’s policies are good – they don’t like him, and they will oppose him at every step of his presidency.
On the other end, there is a base of Trump backers who, regardless of his policies, are hellbent on supporting the president. Conservative policies? Great! Not-so-conservative polices? He’s playing 4D master chess, and you’re just a fool! There isn’t any in-between for these supporters. Let’s call this group of people “Always Trumpers.”
Somewhere in the middle is a third group who applaud the president when he enacts conservative policies, appoints originalist judges, and fights back at the dishonest media, but condemn him when he behaves poorly or supports policies or agendas that are not so conservative.
The “Never Trumpers” and those who support Trump no matter what are equally blinded by passion.
It has to be acceptable to reward good behavior while taking the president to task over his shortcomings. Donald Trump has appointed at least one stellar Supreme Court Justice in Neil Gorsuch, reduced the unemployment rate to record lows, cut taxes, repealed regulations, taken a dishonest media to task, and sided with pro-life and religious freedom causes, among other things.
He has also failed to do anything about the rapidly increasing national debt despite swearing to reduce spending, his long-promised border wall is essentially nonexistent, and his childish cruelty has shoved political discourse further into the mud, facilitating the greater tribalization of the American people.
This isn’t to say that the Democrats are any better. They’re not. They’re actively running a socialist in the primary race for president. However, the “Always Trumpers” are the type who will, when reading the above paragraph, become indignant at the very notion that a Republican or conservative would dare say anything negative about the president. They will take to the comments section in a huff to excoriate the author, calling them a disloyal cuck or something equally ridiculous, despite the clearly articulated message above that one can support President Trump, even vote for him, and still recognize the less flattering aspects of his presidency.
These “Always Trumpers” cannot handle dissent or any information that doesn’t comport with their worldview that President Trump is the greatest of all time and must not be criticized. Because of this, much like the far-left Medicare for All advocates who have lost all depth of perspective, they will respond to critics with ad hominem attacks and meltdowns.
Dispassion would allow “Always Trumpers” to step back, and see the world in colors other than black and white.
There’s no such thing as a world without passion. As mentioned at the beginning of this piece, passion is a necessary component of politics, and of life in general. However, when passion isn’t tempered by dispassion, it can evolve into a monstrous blindness that devours anyone and anything it perceives to be a threat.
Blind passion is poisoning us. The United States is two milky-eyed beasts on a collision course.
The tonic of dispassion is sometimes unpleasant, and it requires humility and a willingness to open oneself up to contrary notions, but if we don’t take this tonic, we risk destroying beyond salvage our credibility to fight for and defend the ideas in which we strongly believe.

Donkey &#038; Elephant

CAMP: Blind Passion Is Poisoning Our Political Process

Donald Trump

Politics

Socialist Bernie Sanders, the current front runner in the Democratic nomination race, told CBS News on Sunday night that his government-run health care system would not be &#8220;run by the government,&#8221; and that it just gets &#8220;rid of the private insurance companies.&#8221;
Sanders, whose proposal would force all Americans off of their private insurance plans and onto a government-run system, made the contradictory remarks during an interview with Anderson Cooper on &#8220;60 Minutes.&#8221;
&#8220;Isn&#8217;t that a dangerous message for Democrats to say, &#8216;You know what? We&#8217;re gonna take away your private insurance. We&#8217;re gonna give you something better run by the government,'&#8221; Cooper said. &#8220;A lot of people don&#8217;t trust that.&#8221;
&#8220;It&#8217;s not run by the government,&#8221; Sanders falsely claimed. &#8220;Medicare allows you to go to any doctor you want for better or worse, this is not socialized medicine. This is keeping the same system intact, but getting rid of the private insurance companies, giving people another card, which allows them complete freedom.&#8221;
WATCH:
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Bernie on his government-run health care system: &quot;It&#39;s not run by the government. Medicare allows you to go to any doctor you want for better or worse, this is not socialized medicine. This is keeping the same system intact, but getting rid of the private insurance companies&#8230;&quot; <a href="https://t.co/bTkISJTASp">pic.twitter.com/bTkISJTASp</a>
&mdash; (((Jason Rantz))) on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) <a href="https://twitter.com/jasonrantz/status/1231766919042068480?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 24, 2020</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;Sanders is a longtime support of single-payer socialized medicine, and in many ways is the intellectual progenitor for the current Democratic Party candidate trend of favoring &#8216;Medicare for All,'&#8221; The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/where-does-bernie-sanders-stand-issues-heres-josh-hammer">reported</a> last year. &#8220;He has often been critical of Obamacare for not going far enough with respect to health care coverage for all uncovered Americans. Sanders has never indicated any willingness to structurally reform fiscally ruinous health care-related entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid.&#8221;
There is no denying that Sanders is lying with his false claim that his government-run health care system is not &#8220;run by the government&#8221; and that it is not &#8220;socialized medicine.&#8221;
The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/health/private-health-insurance-medicare-for-all-bernie-sanders.html">reported</a> last March:
<blockquote>At the heart of the “Medicare for all” proposals championed by Senator Bernie Sanders and many Democrats is a revolutionary idea: Abolish private health insurance.
Proponents want to sweep away our complex, confusing, profit-driven mess of a health care system and start fresh with a single government-run insurer that would cover everyone.
But doing away with an entire industry would also be profoundly disruptive. The private health insurance business employs at least a half a million people, covers about 250 million Americans, and generates roughly a trillion dollars in revenues. Its companies’ stocks are a staple of the mutual funds that make up millions of Americans’ retirement savings.
Such a change would shake the entire health care system, which makes up a fifth of the United States economy, as hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and pharmaceutical companies would have to adapt to a new set of rules. Most Americans would have a new insurer — the federal government — and many would find the health insurance stocks in their retirement portfolios much less valuable.</blockquote>
While some view health care as a winning issue for Sanders, the opposite could very easily be true as the overwhelming majority like their private health insurance and are not willing to give up their private insurance.
The Hill <a href="https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/428958-poll-voters-want-the-government-to-provide-healthcare-for">reported</a> last year, &#8220;A new poll finds that about only one in 10 registered voters want the equivalent of Medicare for all if it means abolishing private health insurance plans.&#8221;
The Washington Post reported last year, &#8220;You wouldn’t know it to read most of the news coverage, or to listen to politicians, but that is one of the more consistent results in health-care polling: Over and over again, roughly 7 out of every 10 Americans <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcare-quite-positively.aspx">report</a> that they’re fairly satisfied with the quality of their personal coverage.&#8221;
Gallup <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcare-quite-positively.aspx">reported</a> at the end of 2018, &#8220;As the incoming Congress prepares to debate further changes to the U.S. healthcare system, solid majorities of Americans rate the coverage (69%) and quality (80%) of the healthcare they personally receive as &#8216;excellent&#8217; or &#8216;good.'&#8221;

Democratic Presidential Candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders Campaigns In Texas

Bernie On His Government Health Program: Not ‘Run By The Government,’ Just Gets Rid Of Free Market

Socialism

At the debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday night, heart attack survivor Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) appeared to praise free-market healthcare on the same night he advocated abolishing it.
Last October, Sanders suffered a heart attack and received treatment at the Desert Springs Hospital Medical Center in Nevada. During the debate, he thanked Las Vegas for the &#8220;excellent&#8221; care he received while being there. &#8220;Thank you, Las Vegas, for the excellent medical care I got in the hospital for two days,&#8221; he said.
As <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/hearts-attack-survivor-bernie-sanders-called-out-for-praising-free-market-system-health-care">pointed out</a> by former George H.W. Bush staffer Brad Blakeman on Fox Nation, Sanders was in fact praising private healthcare at that moment despite being a staunch advocate against it.
&#8220;What I really liked was he thanked the health care system of Nevada, which saved his life, which is a private health care system,&#8221; said Blakeman. &#8220;He had the best of the best. Why? Because it&#8217;s a free-market system. You go to DMV&#8230; that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m calling Medicare-for-all. If you like going to the DMV, you&#8217;re going to love Medicare-for-all.&#8221;
During the debate, Sanders&#8217; took a beating on his Medicare-For-All plan, especially due to the fact that one of Nevada&#8217;s most powerful unions, the Culinary Union, recently denounced it prior to the upcoming caucus. From <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/483769-democratic-clash-over-medicare-for-all-reaches-new-heights-in-debate">The Hill</a>:
<blockquote>The Culinary Union in Nevada, a powerful force in the state, has made waves by criticizing Sanders’s plan for taking away the health benefits they negotiated and replacing them with a new government plan.
Sanders sought to offer reassurance that the government plan would be even more generous.
“I will never sign a bill that will reduce the health care benefits they have,” he said of the union.
However, Buttigieg called it “condescension and arrogance” to say the government knows better than unions as to which health insurance plan is best.
Like Klobuchar, Buttigieg is pushing for an optional government health insurance plan that would allow people to retain their private insurance.</blockquote>
The issue of Bernie&#8217;s health was also the subject of conversation at the debate on Wednesday night, a serious topic in light of the fact that the socialist senator has refused to release all of his medical records.
&#8220;We released the full report of heart attack, full 29 years in Capitol medical history, and furthermore, we released reports from two leading Vermont cardiologists who describe my situation and, by the way, who said Bernie Sanders is more than able to deal with stress and vigor of being the president of the United States,&#8221; Sanders <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/bernie-doubles-down-on-health-record-secrecy-attacks-bloomberg">told his critics</a> on Wednesday night.
Prior to the debate, Sanders’ spokesperson Briahna Joy Gray told CNN that Sanders is fully fit to be President of the United States.
“I think the American people deserve to know exactly as much as every other candidate in this race, currently and historically,” Gray said. “It’s really telling given that none of same concern is being demonstrated for Michael Bloomberg, who is the same age as Bernie Sanders, who has suffered heart attacks in the past.&#8221;
If Bernie Sanders were elected, he would be the oldest president in history.

Democratic Presidential Candidates Debate In Las Vegas Ahead Of Nevada Caucuses

Did Heart Attack Survivor Bernie Sanders Mistakenly Praise Free Market Healthcare In The Debate?

During the NBC Democratic presidential debate on Wednesday night, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg ripped into socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) over his health care plan.
Buttigieg hammered Sanders over his lack of transparency, hitting the senator for repeatedly stating that he doesn&#8217;t know the cost of this own plan, and has only outlined tax hikes, including on folks in the lower-middle class, to pay for a fraction of the estimated cost.
Sanders &#8220;said it was impossible to even know how much it&#8217;s going to cost, and even after raising taxes on everybody making $29,000, there is still a multi-trillion dollar hole,&#8221; Buttigieg said of Sanders&#8217; pricey Medicare for All plan.
&#8220;Matter of fact,&#8221; the former mayor continued, &#8220;if you add up all his policies together, they come to $50 trillion. He&#8217;s only explained $25 trillion worth of revenue, which means the hole in there is bigger than the size of the entire economy of the United States.&#8221;
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On if Bernie Sanders&#39;s release of doctors&#39; notes in lieu of full medical records is sufficient, Pete Buttigieg says, &quot;No, it&#39;s not,&quot; says, &quot;I am certainly prepared to get a physical, put out the results, I think everybody here should be willing to do the same.&quot; <a href="https://t.co/fgvkHNp4iW">pic.twitter.com/fgvkHNp4iW</a>
&mdash; DJ Judd (@DJJudd) <a href="https://twitter.com/DJJudd/status/1230324075282812934?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 20, 2020</a></blockquote>
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WATCH:
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Buttigieg hammers Bernie on lack of transparency on his healthcare plan costs <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DemDebate?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#DemDebate</a> <a href="https://t.co/uTq3NeUkqd">pic.twitter.com/uTq3NeUkqd</a>
&mdash; The Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDailyWire/status/1230335591121854467?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 20, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Earlier in the debate, Buttigieg hit Sanders for being &#8220;polarizing&#8221; and &#8220;not even a Democrat.&#8221;
&#8220;We have got to wake up as a party,&#8221; Buttigieg said, according to <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/02/19/bernie-sanders-turns-red-in-fiery-exchange-with-pete-buttigieg-at-democrat-debate/">Breitbart News</a>. &#8220;We could wake up two weeks from today, the day after Super Tuesday, and the only candidates left standing will be Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg, the two most polarizing figures on this stage.&#8221;
&#8220;And most Americans don’t see where they fit if they have got to choose between a socialist who thinks that capitalism is the root of all evil, and a billionaire that thinks that money ought to be the root of all power,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;Let’s put forward somebody who actually lives and works in a middle-class neighborhood in an industrial Midwestern city. Let’s put forward somebody who’s actually a Democrat.&#8221;
Sanders responded: &#8220;If speaking to the needs and the pain of a long-neglected working class is &#8216;polarizing&#8217; – I think you have got the wrong word. What we are trying, finally, to do is to give a voice to people who, after 45 years of work, are not making a nickel more than they did 45 years ago. We are giving a voice to people who are saying, we are sick and tired of billionaires like Mr. Bloomberg seeing huge expansions of their wealth while a half a million people sleep out on the street tonight. And that’s all what we are saying, Pete, is maybe it’s time for the working class for this country to have a little bit of power in Washington, rather than your billionaire campaign contributors.&#8221;
&#8220;We can actually deliver health care without taking it away from anyone,&#8221; Buttigieg retorted. &#8220;We can actually empower workers and lift wages without further polarizing this country. And we can build a movement without having legions of our supporters online and in person attacking Democratic figures and union leaders alike.&#8221;
The former mayor also said Sanders was not being transparent enough with his health. &#8220;I am certainly prepared to get a physical, put out the results. I think everybody here should be willing to do the same.&#8221;
WATCH:
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We shouldn&#39;t have to choose between one candidate who wants to burn this party down and one candidate who wants to buy this party out. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DemDebate?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#DemDebate</a> <a href="https://t.co/iE8syCzv17">pic.twitter.com/iE8syCzv17</a>
&mdash; Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) <a href="https://twitter.com/PeteButtigieg/status/1230316299026300932?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 20, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Democratic presidential debate

WATCH: Buttigieg Demolishes Sanders On Healthcare, Socialist Plans

democratic debate

Nevada

Pete Buttigieg

There is no doubt that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is now the leading Democratic presidential candidate. That&#8217;s not because his ideas are overwhelmingly popular — a majority of Americans approve of capitalism, while less than 1 in 5 like socialism; few Americans are on board with total nationalization of health care, even if many like the idea of universal health care; most Americans do not approve of Sanders&#8217; anti-American ideology with regard to foreign policy.
But nobody in the Democratic Party can stop Bernie.
There&#8217;s a reason for this: The Democratic Party has fed off the energy of Sanders&#8217; ideology hoping that, eventually, the voters would come to their senses. Leading candidates have echoed Sanders&#8217; talking points. Sen. Elizabeth Warren adopted and then abandoned Medicare for All, and former Vice President Joe Biden mirrored Sanders&#8217; Howard Zinn historical perspective. Those who have attempted to siphon off Sanders&#8217; base and approximate his authenticity have failed dramatically.
Instead, Sanders continues to resonate with the base. After all, if you&#8217;re going to go with an anti-Constitution, anti-free market, intersectionality-based perspective, why water it down with insincerity? Sanders brags about the fact that his ideology has never changed. He&#8217;s right. Back in 1976, he suggested that he favored &#8220;the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries.&#8221; He sounded off for decades on the glories of communist Cuba and the Soviet Union; he basked in the joys of bread lines, saying: &#8220;In other countries, people don&#8217;t line up for food. The rich get the food, and the poor starve to death.&#8221; Sanders trots out campaign surrogates who openly claim that the United States is rooted in genocide and racism, and that the American system must be fundamentally remade.
This is radical stuff. But radicals have passion. And politicians of the Democratic Party are unwilling to quell that passion — not when they believe they can capture it and turn it against President Donald Trump.
This is the mirror image of the Republican problem with Trump in 2016: Trump ran on a platform of bashing the Iraq War and America&#8217;s intelligence agencies, blasting free trade, pledging to avoid entitlement program reforms and slamming the door on immigration. Instead of fighting those elements, Republicans decided to tinge their own campaigns with those attitudes and then assume Trump would collapse under the weight of his own personality flaws. That never happened.
Democrats seem to be waiting for another collapse that simply isn&#8217;t coming. Sanders isn&#8217;t going anywhere. His floor is high, and his ceiling remains low — just like Trump. Electability problems aren&#8217;t going to dissuade his supporters, who believe — correctly — that inauthenticity provides its own electoral issues.
There was another path. Some Democrat could have completely and utterly rejected Sanders&#8217; perspective on the world. Some Democrat could have rejected Sanders&#8217; view that America has been a nefarious force in the world; some Democrat could have argued that America isn&#8217;t perfect but that it has always been great; some Democrat could have talked about the wonders of the free market while arguing for greater strictures on it. After all, the majority of Democrats count themselves as patriots who don&#8217;t despise the free market.
But no Democrat was willing to stand up to the Sanders base. They were too greedy for its energy, and too optimistic that the energy was transferable. It wasn&#8217;t. And so the Democratic Party has been captured by an ideology foreign to it — the ideology of Noam Chomsky infused directly into the bloodstream of a party that once touted former President John F. Kennedy. Partisanship is a hell of a drug.

SHAPIRO: Why The Democrats Won’t Stop Bernie

Democratic Socialism

There are a few lessons we can learn from the disastrous beginning of the Democrat Party&#8217;s primary process. A process that, as they boasted in a <a href="https://twitter.com/DNC/status/1224456542478462977">tweet</a> on Monday afternoon, they&#8217;d spent the last three years preparing for. Well the pilot of the Hindenburg was also &#8220;prepared,&#8221; but all of the preparation in the world cannot compensate for incompetent execution.
Somehow, after the build up, Monday night ended without a winner — or any results at all. It seems the Democrats decided to hand the facilitation and management of its primary over to a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/iowa-caucus-results-delayed-by-apparent-app-issue-11580801699">secretive firm</a> literally called Shadow Inc, which is a bit like sending your children to a daycare center named Child Neglect LLC.
These are the sorts of unforced errors the Democrats cannot seem to stop themselves from making, as they continue to achieve the remarkable feat of making the Republican Party look competent by comparison. Of course, I may be giving them too much credit by calling the Iowa debacle an &#8220;error.&#8221; That categorization assumes there is no deliberate corruption at play here, and that is probably not a safe assumption. Especially given the Democrats&#8217; track record with primaries.
All in all, this amounts to more good news for Donald Trump, a man who has been blessed with the most impotent and ineffectual adversaries the world has ever seen. But it is also an ominous warning about the future, should Trump still manage to lose to these blundering clowns (a possibility that seems less likely with each passing day).
<iframe title="Democrat Clown Show Wants To Run Health Care System | The Matt Walsh Show Ep. 419" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qpWybf4OtGk?start=77&#038;feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
We should keep in mind that these people, who cannot figure out how to operate their own primary, also want to operate the entire health care system. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in particular have promised a complete government takeover of health care. Indeed, Sanders is on the record advocating a complete government takeover of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/14/politics/kfile-bernie-nationalization/index.html">all major industries</a>. Which, by the way, is full-blown communism. And not &#8220;communism&#8221; in the loose, pejorative sense, but actual communism. The communism of Soviet Russia and the Khmer Rouge and many of the other evil, blood-drenched regimes of the 20th century.
This latter fact should be enough to cause us to run fast and far away from any candidate who advocates a full government takeover of any industry, let alone every industry. But if the 20th century is too far in the past to make an impression, than this Monday is lesson enough.
In order for the plans proposed by Sanders, Warren, and company, to have any appeal, we must first place our trust in the skill, competency, and integrity of government bureaucrats. This is the part of the case that the socialists never bother trying to make. Yes, they can tell a harrowing tale about the evils of capitalism, and they can convince us to look with suspicion on corporations and those dreaded billionaires, but they never get to the part where they actually explain why we should trust them instead.
That&#8217;s because even they could not make that argument with a straight face. We&#8217;ve all been to the DMV. We know how the government works. This week is just the latest example.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-inconsistencies-found-in-democrat-iowa-caucus-reporting-conspiracies-explode">‘Inconsistencies’ Found In Democrat Iowa Caucus Reporting, Conspiracies Explode</a>

WALSH: The Democrat Party Can’t Run Its Own Primary But Wants To Run The Health Care System

Elizabeth Warren

On Wednesday, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Phillip Swagel testified before the House Budget Committee. During the testimony, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) asked Swagel about the Democrats’ proposed prescription drug price control bill, H.R. 3.
The following exchange took place:
<blockquote>CRENSHAW: What else did CBO say about H.R. 3? About how many fewer cures there would be because of those price controls? It&#8217;s not a negotiation. Let&#8217;s not call it that; we know it&#8217;s not. It’s a formula for price controls on drug prices. So what did CBO say that would do to innovation?
SWAGEL: So, we also carefully modeled that as well using the economic research literature and showed that over the ensuing several decades, something on the order of 30 fewer drugs would be produced. About a 10% reduction.
CRENSHAW: So, we can afford the drugs, but they won&#8217;t exist. So it doesn’t really matter if you can afford them because they won&#8217;t exist. That’s not a really good trade-off.</blockquote>
The pertinent portion of the video begins at the 1:57:17 mark:
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The <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-12/hr3_complete.pdf">CBO report</a> for H.R. 3 reads in part:
<blockquote>CBO estimates that under the bill, approximately 8 fewer drugs would be introduced to the U.S. market over the 2020-2029 period, and about 30 fewer drugs over the subsequent decade. (Under current law, the Food and Drug Administration approves, on average, about 30 new drugs annually, suggesting that about 300 drugs might be approved over the next 10 years.) The estimates are in the middle of the distribution of possible outcomes, in CBO’s assessment, and are uncertain.
Those effects would occur because the potential global revenues for a new drug over its lifetime would decline as a result of enactment, and in some cases the prospect of lower revenues would make investments in research and development less attractive to pharmaceutical companies. The result would be fewer new drug products developed and coming to market. The effects would be larger in the 2030s because of the considerable time needed to develop new drugs and because of the larger effects that would occur when more phases of development are affected. Later in the 2030s, the size of the effects would stabilize at an annual reduction of roughly 10 percent.</blockquote>
Under <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/3/text">H.R. 3</a>, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) would create a negotiation relationship with pharmaceutical companies.
According to the summary for H.R. 3: “The negotiated maximum price [of certain drugs] may not exceed (1) 120% of the average price in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom; or (2) if such information is not available, 85% of the U.S. average manufacturer price. Drug manufacturers that fail to comply with the bill&#8217;s negotiation requirements are subject to civil and tax penalties.”
This tax penalty is <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-10/hr3ltr.pdf">described</a> by the CBO:
<blockquote>Title I of H.R. 3 would require manufacturers of certain prescription drugs to negotiate prices with the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) &#8230; If manufacturers did not enter into negotiations or agree to prices by specified dates or if they did not meet other conditions, they would be subject to an excise tax of up to 95 percent of the sales of those drugs.</blockquote>
Wayne Winegarden, director of Pacific Research Institute’s Center for Medical Economics and Innovation, writes in <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynewinegarden/2019/10/18/price-controls-are-not-the-answer-to-expensive-drugs/#6262af1a715e">Forbes</a> that prince controls “have always made bad situations worse.” He cites as examples the grain price controls in post-revolution France, which led to a “greater economic crisis,” and, more broadly, rent control, which he says leads to “housing shortages and sharp declines in housing quality.”
“No matter where they have been tried, price controls have always made bad situations worse because it is impossible for policymakers to have the necessary knowledge to dynamically set the efficient price level,” writes Winegarden.
He then writes directly of H.R. 3, and how the excise tax of up to 95% isn’t a negotiation, but a total domination, and that a better alternative to price controls would be reducing various “market barriers,” thus heightening competition.
House Republicans have also outlined their own proposal, <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/19/text">H.R. 19.</a>
According to a <a href="https://www.republicanleader.gov/leader-mccarthys-statement-on-the-lower-costs-more-cures-act-of-2019/">statement</a> released from House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), H.R. 19 would “make medication more affordable for seniors by capping their out-of-pocket costs; increase the availability of generic and biosimilar drugs by prohibiting drug companies from delaying the start of their exclusivity period and allowing the FDA to speed up its approval process for applications; and provide greater price transparency by requiring insurance companies to make information about drug costs available in the doctor’s office before a prescription is written.”

Rep. Dan Crenshaw.

WATCH: Crenshaw Says Dem Price Control Bill Will Stunt ‘Innovation,’ Leading To Fewer New Drugs; CBO Agrees

Dan Crenshaw

Prescription Drugs

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global emergency over the spread of the deadly coronavirus epidemic, as thousands of new cases have been reported and the death toll closes in on 200 people.
&#8220;The decision reversed the organization’s decision just a week ago to hold off such a declaration,&#8221; The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/health/coronavirus-world-health-organization.html">reported</a>. &#8220;Since then, W.H.O. officials said, thousands of new cases in China and clear human-to-human transmission in several other countries — now including the United States — warranted a reconsideration of that decision by the agency’s expert committee.&#8221;
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Thursday that is had confirmed the first person-to-person of the coronavirus in the U.S.
&#8220;The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today confirmed that the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) has spread between two people in the United States, representing the first instance of person-to-person spread with this new virus here,&#8221; the CDC said in a statement. &#8220;Previously, all confirmed U.S. cases had been associated with travel to Wuhan, China, where an outbreak of respiratory illness caused by this novel coronavirus has been ongoing since December 2019. However, this latest 2019-nCoV patient has no history of travel to Wuhan, but shared a household with the patient diagnosed with 2019-nCoV infection on January 21, 2020.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Today CDC and <a href="https://twitter.com/IDPH?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@IDPH</a> confirmed diagnosis of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/2019nCoV?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#2019nCoV</a> in a patient who had not traveled from China but had close contact with a traveler previously confirmed with the novel <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/coronavirus?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#coronavirus</a>. Read the press release: <a href="https://t.co/d7FyZLzRed">https://t.co/d7FyZLzRed</a>. <a href="https://t.co/WSzdgpcgrU">pic.twitter.com/WSzdgpcgrU</a>
&mdash; CDC (@CDCgov) <a href="https://twitter.com/CDCgov/status/1222979023623553024?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 30, 2020</a></blockquote>
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The latest <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/30/coronavirus-cases-top-8200-surpassing-2003-sars-outbreak-in-less-than-a-month.html">figures</a> to come out of communist China indicate that more than 8,100 people have been infected with the virus &#8212; a tenfold increase in just one week &#8212; with at least 170 dead as the virus has now officially spread more rapidly than the SARS virus did in 2002 and 2003.
&#8220;The Committee agreed that the outbreak now meets the criteria for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and proposed the following advice to be issued as Temporary Recommendations,&#8221; WHO said in a statement. &#8220;As this is a new coronavirus, and it has been previously shown that similar coronaviruses required substantial efforts to enable regular information sharing and research, the global community should continue to demonstrate solidarity and cooperation, in compliance with Article 44 of the IHR (2005), in supporting each other on the identification of the source of this new virus, its full potential for human-to-human transmission, preparedness for potential importation of cases, and research for developing necessary treatment.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Full statement on the meeting of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee on the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/2019nCoV?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#2019nCoV</a> 👉 <a href="https://t.co/Ia5pFPn3Qi">https://t.co/Ia5pFPn3Qi</a> <a href="https://t.co/YhlPG2YwOJ">pic.twitter.com/YhlPG2YwOJ</a>
&mdash; World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) <a href="https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1222975329360392215?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 30, 2020</a></blockquote>
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The Financial Times reported on Thursday that Russia closed its borders with China to prevent the virus from spreading into Russia.
&#8220;Russia on Thursday ordered the closure of its huge land border with China as Moscow scrambles to prevent the deadly coronavirus infection spreading from its southern neighbor,&#8221; The Financial Times <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/75adafb6-4306-11ea-abea-0c7a29cd66fe">reported</a>. &#8220;There have been no confirmed cases of the respiratory illness in Russia but Vladimir Putin’s government is anxious to prevent the virus from crossing a land border that stretches for more than 4,000km. Moscow has already blocked Chinese tour groups from entering the country.&#8221;
President Donald Trump weighed in on the overall situation on Thursday, writing on Twitter: &#8220;Working closely with China and others on Coronavirus outbreak. Only 5 people in U.S., all in good recovery.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Working closely with China and others on Coronavirus outbreak. Only 5 people in U.S., all in good recovery.
&mdash; Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1223004106408833025?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 30, 2020</a></blockquote>
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This report has been updated to include additional information and corrected to note that the SARS virus outbreak was from 2002-2003, not 2012-2013.

Health care members make first aid to people as they cover

Global Emergency Declared Over Coronavirus; First Transmission Confirmed In U.S.

China

Health

World Health Organization

On Friday, freshman Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who is very outspoken on the 21s century geopolitical threat <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/end-forever-wars-and-face-chinas-threat-11574634656">posed by China</a>, raised with leading Trump administration officials the possibility of restricting or temporarily outright cutting off travel with the country due to the coronavirus that recently emanated from there.
Hawley &#8220;sent a letter Friday to the heads of four government agencies to ask whether the Trump administration was considering any potential Chinese travel ban to prevent an American outbreak of the coronavirus,&#8221; National Review <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/news/coronavirus-outbreak-josh-hawley-asks-trump-administration-for-possible-china-travel-ban/">reported</a>.
Specifically, Hawley tweeted: &#8220;As deadly #coronavirus spreads, this morning I’ve written to the Secretary of State and others to ask whether temporary travel restrictions from affected areas in China may be necessary, and if they are, when American travelers will be notified. Public safety must be #1 priority.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
As deadly <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/coronavirus?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#coronavirus</a> spreads, this morning I’ve written to the Secretary of State and others to ask whether temporary travel restrictions from affected areas in China may be necessary, and if they are, when American travelers will be notified. Public safety must be #1 priority
&mdash; Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) <a href="https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1220726263956021248?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 24, 2020</a></blockquote>
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The tweet accompanied a <a href="https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2020-01/Hawley-Letter-Coronavirus-Departments-Health-Homeland-Security-State-Transportation-Travel.pdf">letter</a> that Hawley sent on Friday to four Cabinet secretaries or acting secretaries: Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services, Chad Wolf of the Department of Homeland Security, Elaine Chao of the Department of Transportation, and Mike Pompeo of the State Department.
Hawley&#8217;s letter concludes by asking four questions of the Cabinet secretaries:
<ol>
<li>Does the federal government have in place procedures and evaluative criteria to guide decisions about restrictions on air travel in the event of disease outbreaks such as this one?</li>
<li>Given the rate at which public health officials are capable of gaining insight into the severity of such an outbreak, can you offer guidance as to when and how the federal government would decide to implement travel restrictions in the event that an outbreak like this one merited them?</li>
<li>Have you begun exploring the means by which the federal government might continue to assist China and the international community in containing this outbreak in the event of restrictions on commercial air travel? If not, why not?</li>
<li>In the event that federal officials make a preliminary determination to rule out restrictions on air travel, will you commit to inform the public that such a determination has been made in the interests of transparency and appropriate public scrutiny?</li>
</ol>
&#8220;The virus, which, causes pneumonia-like symptoms, is related to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, a virus that originated in China and killed hundreds of people in 2002 and 2003,&#8221; National Review also noted.
Since the virus&#8217;s breakout, China has quarantined the entire city of Wuhan in an attempt to staunch the virus&#8217;s pernicious spread.
Conservative commentator Daniel Horowitz, of Blaze Media, <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/will-trump-consider-suspending-travel-china-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/">wrote</a> today in support of a Chinese travel ban: &#8220;One would expect that the first course of action of the government would be to prevent Chinese from traveling here or Americans from traveling to China and returning, or at least to impose a travel ban on parts of China. That is the first step to ensuring that the disease doesn’t spread like wildfire in our country. Yet, as with epidemics of the past, there doesn’t seem to be any imminent warning of suspending travel.&#8221;
Taking a somewhat different approach, Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-the-media-wants-you-to-panic-over-the-coronavirus-dont-fall-for-it-here-are-the-real-facts">chalked up</a> the coronavirus as much ado about nothing: &#8220;I don’t mean to spoil the twist ending, but here’s how to protect yourself from the coronavirus if you live in America: Do nothing special at all. Carry on with your life. Wash your hands. Avoid ingesting the bodily fluids of strangers, as much as possible. Do all of the normal things you would do to maintain a healthy life. Media reports indicate that face masks are an &#8216;<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-face-masks-not-entirely-effective-2020-1" data-reader-unique-id="14">ineffective&#8217;</a> way of preventing the spread of the virus. What the reports forget to mention is that it would be a sign of delusional paranoia if a person in the United States went around wearing a mask for fear of a disease that almost nobody in this hemisphere actually has.&#8221;

Cargo containers with China and united States flag in the harbor.

Josh Hawley Proposes Possible China Travel Ban In Response To Coronavirus

Immigration

Josh Hawley

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was grilled on Friday during an interview on CBS News after he claimed that no one knew how much his estimated $60 trillion in government programs were going to cost.
&#8220;While the new spending programs Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed in his presidential campaign would at least double federal spending over the next decade, he has faced almost no questions from other candidates or the media – on the eve of the last debate before primary voting begins – about how he would implement or finance such a massive increase,&#8221; CNN <a href="https://outline.com/bBywr2">reported</a> last week, noting that his plan &#8220;would potentially bring his 10-year total for new spending to around $60 trillion, or more.&#8221;
&#8220;You are a self-proclaimed socialist,&#8221; CBS News&#8217; Norah O&#8217;Donnell began.
“‘Democratic,’ put in there please,&#8221; Sanders shot back.
&#8220;Thank you. Your agenda has promised free health care for everybody, free college tuition, and to pay off people&#8217;s college loans,&#8221; O&#8217;Donnell continued. &#8220;The price tag for that is estimated to be $60 trillion over ten years, correct?&#8221;
&#8220;Well look, we have political opponents who come up –&#8221; Sanders responded.
&#8220;You don&#8217;t know? You don&#8217;t know how much your plan costs?&#8221; O&#8217;Donnell pressed.
&#8220;You don&#8217;t know; nobody knows,&#8221; Sanders responded. &#8220;This is impossible to predict.&#8221;
&#8220;You&#8217;re going to propose a plan to the American people, and you&#8217;re not going to tell them how much it costs?&#8221; O&#8217;Donnell persisted.
&#8220;Of course I will,&#8221; Sanders responded. &#8220;Do you know exactly what health care costs will be – one minute – in the next ten years if we do nothing? It will be a lot more expensive than a Medicare for All single payer system.”
WATCH:
<iframe title="Bernie Sanders: “Nobody Knows” How Much My Plans Will Cost" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6QqYQW7ivWI?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
The estimated $60 trillion price tag for Sanders&#8217; socialist agenda may be a generously low estimate, as others have noted that his programs could cost nearly $100 trillion.
The City Journal <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/bernie-sanders-expensive-spending-proposals">reported</a> last October:
<blockquote>All told, Sanders’s current plans would cost as much as $97.5 trillion over the next decade, and total government spending at all levels would surge to as high as 70 percent of gross domestic product. Approximately half of the American workforce would be employed by the government. The ten-year budget deficit would approach $90 trillion, with average annual deficits exceeding 30 percent of GDP.
The $97.5 trillion price tag is made up mostly of the costs of Sanders’s three most ambitious proposals. Sanders <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNP-AQlVZKM" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">concedes</a> that his Medicare For All plan would increase federal spending by “somewhere between $30 and $40 trillion over a 10-year period.” He pledges to spend <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/28/bernie-sanders-climate-plan-sets-tone-on-crucial-issue-in-democratic-primary.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">$16.3 trillion</a> on his climate plan. And his proposal to guarantee all Americans a full-time <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/23/bernie-sanders-to-unveil-plan-to-guarantee-every-american-a-job/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">government job</a> paying $15 an hour, with full benefits, is estimated to cost $30.1 trillion. The final $11.1 trillion includes <a href="https://berniesanders.com/issues/free-college-cancel-debt/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">$3 trillion</a> to forgive all student loans and guarantee free public-college tuition—plus <a href="https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-defazio-introduce-bill-to-expand-social-security" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">$1.8 trillion</a> to expand Social Security, <a href="https://berniesanders.com/issues/housing-all/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">$2.5 trillion</a> on housing, <a href="http://www.crfb.org/blogs/sanderss-paid-family-leave-plan-explained/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">$1.6 trillion</a> on paid family leave, <a href="https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-calls-for-1-trillion-investment-in-vermont-and-nations-infrastructure" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">$1 trillion</a> on infrastructure, <a href="https://www.the74million.org/article/bernie-sanderss-k-12-proposal-would-more-than-double-the-federal-education-budget-6-of-his-top-spending-priorities/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">$800 billion</a> on general K-12 education spending, and an additional <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sanders-unveils-plan-to-overhaul-public-education-2019-5" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">$400 billion</a> on higher public school teacher salaries.
This unprecedented outlay would more than double the size of the federal government. Over the next decade, Washington is already projected to spend <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/publication/54918" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">$60 trillion</a>, and state and local governments will spend another $29.7 trillion from non-federal sources. Adding Sanders’s $97.5 trillion—and then subtracting the $3 trillion saved by state governments under Medicare For All—would raise the total cost of government to $184 trillion, or 70 percent of the projected GDP over ten years
Such spending would far exceed even that of European social democracies. The 35 <a href="https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-spending.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">OECD</a> countries average 43 percent of GDP in total government spending. Finland’s 57 percent tops the list, edging France and Denmark. Meantime, Sweden and Norway—regularly lauded as models for the U.S.—spend just under 50 percent of GDP. The U.S. government, at all levels, spends between 34 percent and 38 percent of GDP, depending on how one calculates.</blockquote>
Sanders is not the only Democrat proposing an estimated $100 trillion in government programs as Sen. Elizabeth Warren&#8217;s (D-MA) proposals have also received <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/elizabeth-warren-policies-100-trillion-town-hall">the same</a> estimated price tag.

Bernie: ‘Impossible’ To Know How Much My $60 Trillion In Plans Cost. CBS News Grills Him.

On Saturday, December 28, former Vice President and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden held a campaign event in Washington, Iowa.
During a question and answer session, a young man asked Biden about his support for Obamacare:
<blockquote>I just need this question. So we&#8217;re going to take a trip back 2008 real quick. During the run-up to the passage of Obamacare, President Obama promised my father that if he likes his plan, he can keep his plan, and that his insurance will be cheaper. After passage, his plan was no longer allowed and his insurance costs doubled. Since you supported the plan, were you lying to my dad? Or did you not understand the bill you supported?</blockquote>
Biden began his answer with a what appears to have been a joke, the offered an incoherent ramble:
<blockquote>No, look, the fact is that what I&#8217;m talking about now is that when – because I get asked the question – since, what I do is I&#8217;d add a public option to the existence of Obamacare, meaning that a Medicare-like option is available if in fact you – but there&#8217;s 160 million people out there who&#8217;ve negotiated a health care plan with their employer that they like and they don&#8217;t want to have to give up like Medicare for All requires. It says you have to give it up. You cannot have any private insurance.</blockquote>
Biden then told the young man that costs have “gone down.”
<blockquote>What happened is, and by the way, the cost of Obamacare has gone down in the last two years, not up as you probably know, you seem to know this, number one. </blockquote>
Then, he talked about the fact that people shouldn’t be forced to give up their insurance plans:
<blockquote>Number two is that when you put yourself in a position of – I have faith in the American people – that if you&#8217;ve worked and given up significant portions of your salary over the last two, five, 10, 12 years to get a healthcare plan you like that you negotiated with an employer, then in fact, you should not be forced to give it up. You should have the choice. If you want to keep it, you can keep it. And if in fact the employer eliminates the plan, which he could, eliminates the plan, then you&#8217;d have the option to buy into a subsidized plan of Obamacare.</blockquote>
Following this, Biden spoke for another four minutes before arriving back at a semblance of an answer in which he noted that “no one did understand Obamacare.”
<blockquote>We&#8217;ve changed a lot of things for the better, and we&#8217;ve tried under five Democratic presidents, tried to change those things, and people say, &#8220;Well Biden, why now do you think you can add the public option and why can you further subsidize it?&#8221;
Well, because people, there&#8217;s two ways people know when something is important. One, when it&#8217;s so clear when it&#8217;s passed that everybody understands it – and no one did understand Obamacare, including the way it was rolled out.
And the gentleman&#8217;s right, he said, &#8220;You could keep your doctor if you wanted to,” and you couldn&#8217;t keep your doctor if you wanted to necessarily. He&#8217;s dead right about that. But the fact is that when something&#8217;s taken away, when you – people didn&#8217;t know. I used to say to President Obama, &#8220;Mr. President, why don&#8217;t you take a victory lap? You got this passed. Let people know exactly what&#8217;s happened.&#8221;
&#8230;And he&#8217;d say, &#8220;We don&#8217;t have time to take a victory lap. We have too many things we have to do.&#8221; So people didn&#8217;t know, and we lost the House of Representatives after that passed. And people attributed to the fact that Obamacare passed and that was one of the arguments made, whether it&#8217;s true or not.</blockquote>
In the end, Biden simply didn’t answer the young man’s very simple question.
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Former President Obama’s promise that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” was ranked as Politifact’s 2013 “<a href="https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-keep-it/">Lie of the Year</a>.”
After the Obamacare rollout disaster, and at least 37 documented instances of Obama using the “keep your plan” phrase “without caveats,” reports Politifact, the president was forced to concede that what he claimed just wasn’t true.
Speaking with NBC’s Chuck Todd in November 2013, Obama <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nbc-news/53492840#53492840">said</a>: “We weren’t as clear as we needed to be in terms of the changes that were taking place, and I want to do everything we can to make sure that people are finding themselves in a good position, a better position than they were before this law happened. And I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.”

Joe Biden.

Biden Dodges ‘You Can Keep Your Plan’ Obamacare Question: ‘Were You Lying … Or Did You Not Understand The Bill You Supported?’

Obamacare

Dr. Raj Mehta, 65, had been a general practitioner for the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) for nearly 40 years when he was accused of sexually assaulting a female patient during a consultation.
The patient claimed Mehta touched her breast during the consultation – which was, apparently, not a breast exam. He was charged in 2017 with two counts of sexual assault. He was convicted on one of those counts. The U.K.’s General Medical Council revoked Mehta’s right to practice after his conviction, even though he had planned to appeal.
Last week, Mehta won his appeal after his attorney’s found evidence that the patient who accused him had lied under oath. The decision to appeal was made on December 13 and a full written judgement will be released in the New Year.
GP Online, a magazine and news source for general practitioner, <a href="https://www.gponline.com/gp-exonerated-15-months-prison-assault-patient/article/1669363">reported</a> that Mehta was “enormously relieved” after he was exonerated on appeal nearly three years after being convicted.
“After my conviction, I lost everything. I lost my career after nearly 40 years of NHS service. I lost my reputation after adverse media coverage, but also following the medical regulator’s decision to strike me off the medical register, instead of waiting for the outcome of the ongoing appeal,” Mehta told the outlet. “I feel very anxious for the medical profession. Doctors work to do their very best for their patients, often in challenging circumstances, and there simply are not adequate protections to safeguard them against the few patients who make false accusations.”
Dr. Rob Hendry, medical director of Medical Protection, told the outlet: “We are delighted that Dr Mehta has been acquitted by the Court of Appeal. He and his family fought hard to clear his name and we are proud to have been able to support them in achieving this outcome.”
“False allegations can cause a loss of reputation, profession and income. Tragically in Dr Mehta’s case, they can also lead to a loss of liberty,” he added.
Further, Hendry told the outlet, these kinds of allegations hurt trust, which is “vital to the doctor-patient relationship.”
“While such cases are very rare, it is vital that support and protection are in place to protect doctors and the wider profession from the threat of false accusations,” he said.
Nigel Richardson, a defense attorney at Hodge Jones &amp; Allen who represented Mehta, told GP Online: “The conviction of Dr Mehta was particularly troubling, and it took a great deal of effort to uncover the evidence that undermined the single witness’s account.”
Richardson added that Mehta’s “long and distinguished career” had been destroyed due the false allegations and hoped the new British government would pass reforms to the justice system to help victims like Mehta.
It is unknown at this time what evidence the defense presented that convinced a judge to overturn Mehta’s conviction. A spokesperson for the Crown Prosecution Service told GP Online that “The material that formed the basis of the grounds of appeal was not in the possession of the CPS at the time of the original trial, and the Court of Appeal did not suggest that that the prosecution had failed in our duties of disclosure.”

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