Bernie’s Medicare for All Plan

The obvious bears repeating: Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan is HIS plan.

SANDERS: “What our system does is get rid of insurance companies and drug companies making billions of dollars in profit every single year.” [Emphasis added.]

O’KEEFE: “And what happens to those insurance companies after your plan is implemented?” {Emphasis added.]

SANDERS: If you want cosmetic surgery — under Medicare for all, we cover all basic health care need. [Emphasis added.]

SANDERS: “I suppose if you want to make yourself look a little bit more beautiful, work on that nose or your ears, they can do that.” [Emphasis added.]

O’KEEFE: “So basically BlueCross BlueShield would be reduced to nose jobs.”

SANDERS: “Something like that, yeah.”

Bernie proposes. Congress votes. That’s it. The people vote for Congress. The Supreme Court rubber stamps Congress under the commerce clause. Everyone lives happily ever after, right? Except that the government has obliterated competition among medical insurance companies. Your votes for Congress have ended up destroying your decision rights over medical products and services.

Profits seem to be Bernie’s concern. If profits are troublesome, then end patents for drugs, repeal Medicare, and deregulate the entire medical system. Get government entirely out of medicine. Restore the decision rights of Americans over products and services. This will restore competition. Competition reduces rates of return, while also allowing entrepreneurs to innovate in their search for higher rates of return.

Is there any reason why the Mind of Bernie Sanders or the “Mind” of the Congress or the “Mind” of Voters can replace billions of individual decisions? Why should what Bernie plans or Congress plans replace freedom? If there are valid reasons for government’s total control over medicine, do they not also apply to clothing, shelter, food, energy and everything else?

Bernie is a totalitarian, but so are a Congress and a Supreme Court that have already legalized Medicare. So is a “democratic” system of government or a “representative democratic” system that allows such measures to become law.

America becomes more and more totalitarian and less and less a free country. Americans forge their own totalitarian chains in steps. One such step was Wickard v. Filburn. It can be overturned if the American people want it to be. We can restore gold money if we want to. Nothing is written that must happen, even if the prospects for freedom look bleak within the current politics.

Share

9:10 am on April 11, 2019