If you were shadowing Bernie Sanders on the campaign trail, every day you would hear him say, “The United States will join every other major country on earth and guarantee healthcare to all people as a right.”
The very foundation of our great country is the Bill of Rights, the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution. It spells out Americans’ rights; specifically, freedom of speech, press, and religion and it sets rules for due process of law. Fact check; healthcare is not a “right”.
Bernie will go on to tell you it is, “free at the point of service.” Fact check; nothing provided by the government is free. We the people pay for everything.
Bernie claims, “No networks, no premiums, no deductibles, no copays, no surprise bills”. Fact check, there will be a bill Bernie, it’s called taxes and we, not the millionaire down the street, will be taxed like you cannot believe. Fact, you cannot imagine how expensive a massive government program can be until it is “free.”
Bernie tells us that, “Medicare coverage will be expanded and improved to include: dental, hearing, vision, and home-based and community-based long-term care, in-patient and out-patient services, mental health and substance abuse treatment, reproductive and maternity care, prescription drugs, and more.” What Bernie has not told us is what the quality of this health care will be and how it will be paid for.
In the United Kingdom during 2017 a record 4.2 million patients were on National Health Service waiting lists. AFTER having received their diagnosis and referral, 458,000 patients waited longer than four months for treatment. More than 19% wait 2 months or longer to begin their first URGENT CANCER TREATMENT while 17% wait more than 4 months for brain surgery.
In Canada the median wait-time between diagnosis and seeing a specialist is 10.2 weeks. Canadians with heart disease wait 3 months for their FIRST TREATMENT. For life-changing orthopedic surgery, like hip or knee replacement, they likely wait 10 months.
In Europe, lower-income and middle-class taxpayers pay an average marginal wage tax rate of 49 percent on income above $37,000 a year, and an average value-added tax (VAT) of 20 percent. Those same U.S. taxpayers face a marginal wage tax of 32 percent and an average sales tax of 6 percent.
European countries tax revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product: France 46%, Sweden 44%, UK 33%. The US is 27%.
Universal coverage does not mean universal access to quality care; quite the contrary. FACT, every country that has tried nationalized health care has ended up with fewer quality health care professionals, much higher taxes, longer wait times for care, pain, suffering, permanent disability, forgone wages and in many cases premature death.
Fact, we have had government-run medical care for decades; the Veterans Administration. It has been such a dismal failure the whole process has been under scrutiny and investigation for the past twenty years and is not yet fixed. Forty vets died in Phoenix while waiting for appointments. The inspector general found employees hiding treatment delays at 26 facilities and the system is generally plagued by negligence, falsified records and gross mismanagement.
The 2021 VA budget request is $243 billion with 395,000 employees serving about 9 million veterans. Let’s do some scary math. Using these numbers and looking ahead proportionally, in order to serve all 331 million US citizens with total health care, the budget would be almost $9 trillion per year with over 14 million employees. Of course, expanding 9 million patients to 331 million would not be exactly proportional but what if these totals are even half right ($4.5 trillion/7 million employees) or one third right ($3 trillion/4.6 million employees)? The entire federal revenue is expected to be only $3.86 trillion in 2021 with an Executive Branch of less than 3 million people.
Fact: between 2004 and 2017 “mistakes and improper Medicare and Medicaid payments” averaged $48 billion per year. Do we surmise that all that graft, corruption, mistakes and improper payment will magically disappear? I am much more inclined to believe the $48 billion will grow right along with the expansion of the program. Why?
The federal government has a clear and remarkable history of failure when it comes to “running” big, national programs. What do the Postal Service, Social Security, Fannie Mae, Amtrak, and Freddie Mac all have in common? Two things, they are big bloated federal government programs and they are all broke. And so will the taxpayers be…..broke.
If the government confiscated the entire wealth of the top tier income producers, it would not cover the cost of one year of Bernie’s boondoggle universal health care.
Marv Covault, Lieutenant General US Army retired, author of Vision to Execution, a book for leaders