Even people who get their information only from major network news know that, in their mad rush to promise free health care, Democratic presidential hopefuls would raise taxes for nearly everybody including the “hard-working middle class.”
How do they know?
Because at least one of the eager promisers won’t give a straight answer.
Her name is Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Like Bernie Sanders (but not Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden) she is offering “Medicare for All,” which Fox’s Tucker Carlson calls straight-up socialism.*
George Stephanopoulos, Chris Matthews, and “other strident Democratic partisans” have been pressing her on the tax hike issue, and at the recent, fourth national primary debate, Warren continued to evade. Even Sleepy Joe knows that universal single-payer health care spending would require more taxes than can be squeezed out of the very rich and the big corporations (which Warren, Sanders, and other Democrats incessantly push). But Warren just will not say the words: yes, your taxes will go up. She continually feints to her follow-up argument, that since overall health care costs would [according to plan] go down, we would all come out ahead.
Tucker Carlson, citing an Urban Institute study, gives the answer the democratic socialists won’t: their promise would require spending 3.4 trillion tax dollars per year — $10 grand per person per year, including every child, retiree, and prison inmate.** Warren expects us to repress our common sense and believe that cramming all health care spending through the federal government will increase efficiency.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has the right word for Medicare for All: utopian.
Noting that Obamacare failed to live up to its promises, Azar predicts the ultimate result, “Medicare for None.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* And not altogether implausibly, since medicine is a fifth of the American economy and (presumably) since socialism is an economy run by government.
** Tucker’s list.
Illustration from a photo by Gage Skidmore
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