No way are We the Taxpayers stupid enough to want to pay for 'Medicare for All' which is another way of saying Socialized Medicine.

Oh, the Libs are that stupid.

Why should we pay a fortune and bankrupt the country like Venezuela by paying for everybody else's healthcare.

Let's forget Lib and Conservatives for now and think in terms of Health Conscious, True Health Seekers, Healthy Raw Vegan Diet Followers, Alternative Medicine Believers like us - against the idiots who screw themselves up by eating crap and taking drugs/prescription medicines

I'm surprised anyone on this board would want to subsidize other people's stupid choices that we don't agree with like -

Vaccines for all
Prescription drugs
Addictive Substances/Recreational Drugs
Eating anything and everything
Running to the doctor and emergency room every time you sneeze or get a sliver in their finger.
Invasive operations/procedures

I guess I'm just a stingy unfeeling Conservative, because no way do I want to pay for other's stupidity, gluttony, addictions, vices. I'll pay for my own choices and they can pay for theirs.

I'm not paying for other people vaccinating their children and screwing them up when I don't believe in it and didn't screw up my children. I'm not paying for other women killing their babies in the womb when I didn't kill my three babies. I'm not paying for drug addicts drugs, who screwed themselves up and I'm not paying for their addictive Prescription Drugs when I don't believe in or take prescription drugs. I'm not paying for other people's tons of doctor visits every year because they run to the doctor and emergency room whenever they sneeze when I almost never go to the doctor. Not paying a fortune for other people's hospital visits and invasive procedures when I don't go there because of my healthy lifestyle choices. Not paying for their gluttony which lead to decades of sicknesses when I ate sensibly and healthy so I wouldn't get sick, especially in old age. Not paying for others' abusing their bodies and minds when I treat mine with care.

Don't want to ruin the country and my old-age savings because of those Idiots and Freeloaders, and the Lib Virtue-Signalers.

Yeah, and I'm not paying for Illegal Alien's healthcare either. Or criminals' healthcare, or the Libs' healthcare - you get the picture. Or Transexuals' operations, etc.

Should I expect other people to pay for my cosmetic surgery, for my facelift? SAME THING.

Jennifer, you don't need a facelift!! You're beautiful!

Oh, wow, thanks, Prana!

But no I wouldn't get a facelift.

Because you can get natural fillers cheaper!

'Medicare For All' Would Cost $32.6 Trillion, And That's Not Even The Worst Of It

[www.investors.com]

Socialized Health Care: Democrats have been falling over themselves to endorse Bernie Sanders' government takeover of health care. Maybe they should have taken a closer look at his "Medicare for all" plan before signing up. The gargantuan price tag is just one of its many terrible flaws.

Last year, 16 Senators, including three presidential hopefuls, co-sponsored Sanders' "Medicare for all" bill. And earlier this month, more than 70 Democrats signed on to form a "Medicare for all" caucus. Support for the bill is now something of a litmus test for Democratic hopefuls.

Do they have any idea what they're endorsing?

A new study out Monday from George Mason University's Mercatus Center finds that Sanders plan would add $32.6 trillion to federal spending in its first 10 years, with costs steadily rising from there. That closely matches other studies — including one by the liberal Urban Institute — that looked at Sanders' plan.

Underestimating 'Medicare for All' Costs

To put this in perspective, "Medicare for all" would nearly double the size of the already bloated federal government. Doubling corporate and individual income taxes wouldn't cover the costs.

Even this is wildly optimistic. To get to this number, author Charles Blahous had to make several completely unrealistic assumptions about savings under Sanders' hugely disruptive plan.

The first is a massive cut in payments to providers. Sanders wants to apply Medicare's below-market rates across the board, which would amount to a roughly 40% cut in payments to doctors and hospitals. Blahous figures this will save hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

But cuts of that magnitude would drive doctors out of medicine and hospitals out of business, since the only way providers can afford Medicare's cut-rate reimbursements today is by charging private payers more.

The study also assumes that shoving everyone into a government health care plan would cut administrative costs by $1.6 trillion over the next decade and prescription drug costs by $846 billion. Neither of those are likely, and wouldn't make much of a difference in overall spending anyway. Private insurance overhead accounts for about 6% of national health spending, and drugs less than 10%.

There's also the fact that every other federal health program has seen costs explode "unexpectedly" after they were enacted. The per-enrollee cost of ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion, for example, is almost 49% higher than expected. Medicare itself cost nearly 10 times as much as projected in its first 25 years.

A Truly Radical Plan

Democrats are also apparently unaware that "Medicare for all" would be a more expansive than anything that exists anywhere else in the world, with the possible exception of Cuba.

Sanders' plan would eliminate all out-of-pocket expenses for medical, dental and vision care. The only exception would be a small copay for brand-name drugs.

As IBD pointed out, there is no industrialized country in the world that does this. Even in Sanders' beloved Nordic socialist paradises, people pay as much as 30% of their nations' health costs out-of-pocket. In Communist China, almost a third of health spending is out-of-pocket.

Shortages, Long Waits And Waste

Because Sanders would eliminate prices entirely from health care, the only way to control health spending would be to slap stiff price controls on doctors, hospitals and drugs, or ration care.

Here's what health care in the U.S. would look like as a result:

There would be chronic shortages of doctors nationwide. Hospital overcrowding would be epidemic. Waits for everything from hip replacements to cataract surgery to cancer treatments would be extensive. Drug innovation would come to a virtual standstill. And there would be endless fights over the size of the government's health budget, along with massive amounts of waste, fraud and abuse.

How do we know this? Because this is precisely what's happened in countries that have already gone down the "Medicare for all" road.

In Canada, the average wait time for a hip replacement is nearly two years in some provinces. Patients with cataracts can end up waiting a year for surgery. The UK has fewer doctors, nurses and hospital beds per capita than any other industrialized nation, and is in a state of almost constant crisis.

Here at home, the Veterans Health Administration — once touted by the left as a model of socialized medicine — has seen deadly delays and massive corruption, even as its budget ballooned in size.

Almost 10% of Medicare spending today is for what the government euphemistically calls "improper payments," but anyone else would label it waste. Extend this across the entire health care system and Sanders' "Medicare for all" would result in some $400 billion a year in "improper payments."

Central Planning's Failures

But the biggest problem with "Medicare for all" — and any plan to socialize medicine — is its underlying assumption. Namely, that a handful of government central planners can manage trillions of dollars' worth of resources better than hundreds of millions of people making trillions of decisions every day in the free market. They can't.

We already know central planning never works, since it has miserably failed where it's been tried. It didn't work in the Soviet Union. It doesn't work in North Korea or Cuba, and it's causing untold misery in Venezuela.

"Medicare for all" isn't just wishful thinking. It's a dangerous delusion. Republicans, independents and any remaining sensible Democrats should fight against it with every ounce of energy.

How can the Libs be so stupid to actually think Government Run Healthcare Free for All is actually doable and feasible ...

DEMOCRAT MEDICARE-FOR-ALL PLAN WOULD DESTROY THE NATIONAL BUDGET

[dailycaller.com]

“Medicare-for-all” is like a cold sore. It appears randomly, lasts for a week or so, then disappears until next time. This week, it’s back, and it’s on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ lip.

This plan is not new, first appearing in 2003, courtesy of former Congressman John “Underwear in the Office” Conyers. He called it the United National Health Care Act, or HR 676, and had 25 co-sponsors. It went nowhere, but instead remained dormant, like a cold sore, ready to reappear in the future. And it has every few years.

Most recently, after Representative Conyers joined the crowd of abrupt #MeToo retirees, Senator Bernie Sanders is now running with the 15-year-old bill. His web page states adamantly, “The only long-term solution to America’s health care crisis is a single-payer national health care program.”

Bernie has company with his heir apparent, and latest shiny object capturing the attention of Democrats, Congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushing single-payer health care.

Despite her economics degree from Boston University, she came up short with a method to fund her spending spree other than rolling back everything President Trump did to jumpstart the American economy out of the Obama doldrums.

Tax revenues are breaking records after Republican tax cuts. Yet somehow reversing course and raising taxes will provide the government with sufficient money to pay for Medicare-for-all? Ms. Ocasio-Cortez either slept through her economics classes or a Boston University economics degree isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

Fortunately, a group that does understand economics, has weighed in. The Mercatus Center, a research institute at George Mason University, calculated that Medicare-for-all will cost, “approximately $32.6 trillion during its first 10 years of full implementation.” Meaning $3.3 trillion per year compared to a current federal budget of $4.1 trillion.

Suddenly healthcare spending by the federal government would go from a quarter of the budget to more than three-quarters. Leaving little for social security, defense, unemployment, food stamps, and the myriad other categories of government spending. The math doesn’t work.

We already know how the numbers settled out based on recent state attempts at single-payer health care, the “laboratories of democracy”. Vermont tried and failed, passing a single-payer plan which was never implemented as the cost was more than the entire state budget.

Colorado also gave it a shot, via a ballot initiative and a projected cost equal to the entire current state budget. Coloradoans wisely voted this down by a four to one margin. The federal cost projections of Bernie’s plan are in line with the state experiences.

So how would Alexandria and Bernie finance their grand scheme? Raising taxes of course. From the Mercatus report, “Doubling all currently projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections would be insufficient to finance the added federal costs of the plan.”

Did you get that? Doubling taxes still wouldn’t cover the cost.

What effect would a doubling of taxes have on the Trump recovery? Think of a large bucket of water on a roaring campfire. Suppress the economy and what happens to all of these future projected tax revenues to fund Medicare-for-all? Gone, adding to the budget shortfall.

Don’t forget Alexandria and Bernie’s other giveaways, including a guaranteed income, free education, and other universal benefits. Those costs and promises haven’t even been factored into the Mercatus report.

Option B will be to cut payments to physicians, as the report predicts, doctors “will be reimbursed at rates more than 40 percent lower than those currently paid by private health insurance.”

Physician burnout and morale are already a big problem. Cut reimbursement in half and good luck finding a doctor still willing to practice medicine. Everyone will have insurance but what good is insurance if you can’t find a doctor who accepts it?

Expect a two-tiered system to evolve, as it has in most other countries. Cash payment at market rates for those with the means to pay. They will see a quality doctor in a timely manner and receive top rate medical care. Alexandria, Bernie, and every other legislator will be in this category.

For those without the means to pay for private care, expect long waits and care delivered by nurses, physician assistants, and foreign-trained imported doctors. The government will ration care based on the judgment not of physicians but of bureaucrats tasked with balancing the healthcare budget. This is the tier for the rest of America.

Sure, the care will be free, but you will ultimately get what you pay for. Democrats are lurching further left as the midterms approach, eager to spend money they don’t have. From “Making America Great Again” to “Making America into Venezuela”.

Brian C Joondeph, MD, MPS, a Denver based physician and writer.

*************

That's how libs win elections - by promising free stuff to everybody. That's why all the poor people and minorities vote for Democrats.

Another expert who uses her brain instead of like the Libs - talking out their a*ses - "Oh, the government should give 'free' health care to everybody. We'll pay for it by taxing 'the rich' and those nasty 'corporations'. Yeah, Government's great. We want more bigger government and free everything and higher taxes. And you're greedy and have no compassion if you don't agree."

******

EXCLUSIVE: Sally Pipes On Why A Single-Payer Healthcare System Is Bad For America

[www.dailywire.com]

As healthcare premiums go up, Obamacare has become increasingly unpopular with the American public as more people lose their coverage, health plan, and their doctors. While Conservatives have offered free-market solutions to these issues, socialist candidates like Bernie Sanders have offered legislation that would introduce a government-run single-payer system that would bankrupt the country.

Sally Pipes is the president and CEO of the San Franciso-based Pacific Research Institute, a "Forbes" columnist, and healthcare policy expert who has written numerous books on the topic. Her latest book, "The False Promise of Single-Payer Health Care" debunks the Left's idea of the federal government running the medical industry.

The following is an interview with Mrs. Pipes on the single-payer system, Canada's version of it, and the disaster that the federal government often brings to the medical industry.

Q: You recently wrote an article in Forbes about California’s healthcare system’s role in the tremendous, unattainable budget of two-hundred billion dollar budget for the state. What are some suggestions you have on fixing the Golden State’s healthcare system and making it more manageable?

Sally Pipes: Two-hundred billion dollars is a lot of money. It was Governor Jerry Brown’s very last budget and it keeps going up and up as more government programs are becoming entitlement programs in the state of California.

It looks like Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom will become the new governor and he is big supporter of single-payer healthcare or “medicare for all,” not allowing any private insurance at all, making everything under a government plan.

In June 2017, the state senate passed SB-562, a single-payer bill, which have cost, according to the senate appropriations committee, four hundred billion dollars a year, double the size of the California budget. Fortunately the bill was parked by the legislature’s Democrat speaker of the house, who said it did not say how much the bill would cost or how it would be paid for.

The last thing we want in California is a single-payer healthcare system which is even more comprehensive than the one in Canada.

Q: On the Canada note, its healthcare system has a lot of proponents in the United States who want to duplicate their programs for us. Could you briefly touch on Canada’s system and whether or not it would work in the US?

Sally Pipes: I am Canadian, I grew up under the single-payer healthcare system. Canada is only one of eleven developed countries that does not allow for any private insurance for something that is medically necessary.

I previously worked at an institute where we started a publication called "Wait Your Turn: A Guide To Waiting Lists In Canada."

In 2017, the average wait time to see a primary care doctor or treatment by a specialist in Canada was 22.1 weeks, over five months. Over one million Canadians are on that list, trying to get a doctor. Just last week, the Fraser Institute released the cost of this “free” system. It turns out that nothing is free. An average Canadian family of four pays, through hidden taxes and fees, around thirteen thousand dollars for long waiting lists, rationed care, and light access to the latest treatment.

Also, there’s a shortage of doctors and hospital beds in Canada because doctors’ salaries are tied to what each provincial government is willing to pay for a procedure. Of course, a lot of doctors quit medicine and retired early.

This is a system we do not want in the United States, but Senator Bernie Sanders has been pushing this very hard with his “medicare for all” bills since he was running against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016.

He never says what this would cost, but the Urban Institute, which is Left-wing, said $32 trillion over ten years.

Q: That’s trillion with ‘T'?

Sally Pipes: Trillion with a "T." This would mean that the United States would have the same problems as Canada. Rationed care, long waits, much higher taxes. That includes income taxes, corporate taxes, payroll taxes, and even if you doubled all of those taxes, it would not cover the cost of this of this single-payer system.

Q: President Obama tried to initiate a universal healthcare-light, known as Obamacare, and one of your accomplishments is your commentary on Obamacare. In 2016, you wrote the book "The Way out of Obamacare" where you lay out a plan to get out of that system. Do you believe that President Trump’s attempt to stall Obamacare through executive order helped or hurt the process of repealing it? Or could the current administration do more?

Sally Pipes: Obamacare became the law of the land on March 23, 2010, so it’s eight-and-a-half years old. It has not worked for the American people. High premiums, high deductibles, narrow networks of doctors and hospitals, and only 12 million people covered in a country of over 330 million, so it has not worked.

President Trump, when he was running for president, along with GOP candidates for the House and Senate, were running on a repeal and replace measure for Obamacare.

Unfortunately, by the fall of 2017, they were unable to achieve that. President Trump, in October, announced a plan to extend short - term plans from three months to twelve months. The executive branch even made it so you could extend it to thirty-six months if you wanted.

Now these plans are not for everyone and (Democrat Senate Minority Leader) Chuck Schumer is trying to say they are junk plans. They are not, they are giving people who don’t have employer-based coverage an option. I’m a big fan of this new rule.

Q: Are you for a straight repeal, repeal and replace, and if so, what would you replace it with?

Sally Pipes: I’ve been a huge fan of "repeal and replace." When (former Health and Human Services Secretary) Tom Price was in the House with Speaker Paul Ryan, we were all on the same page on a replace agenda. I would like to see it fully repealed and then replaced with a plan that empowers patients and doctors, not the federal government.

The plan I would like to see would change the tax code to allow those with private insurance to get the [same] tax benefits as those with employer-based coverage. People who are insured through their employer get their coverage tax free, but if you go into the individual market you have to pay for it with tax dollars.

That would be a huge thing in leveling the playing field. I would like to see states reduce their mandates on healthcare. I would like to see medical malpractice reform. Doctors do practice defensive medicine because they are afraid of being sued. I’d like to see people be able to buy insurance from across state lines. I’d like to see Medicare made better by increasing the age limit from 65 because the average American lives to 79. I would like to see changes to Medicaid.

There’s a lot of things that can be done.

The last thing is, when you hear people on the Left saying that Republicans want to go back to hurt people with pre-existing conditions, there are only about six million people in the market who have chronic or pre-existing conditions. The solution to help those people is to allow the states to set-up high-risk pools with funds from the federal government so that those people could get coverage and not make younger, healthier people pay for those costs. High-risk pools are a great way to deal with people who have these pre-existing conditions.

Q: One last question: Your latest book, "The False Promise Of Single-Payer Healthcare," will be released in March. Tell us what it is about and what you hope your readers will take away from it.

Sally Pipes: As America has become enthralled with the idea of a single-payer, Medicare for all system, with people like Bernie Sanders and the new darling of the Left Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the polls show that 51% of Americans and 75% of Democrats favor that kind of system. My book explains exactly what single-payer is and gives examples of it in Canada and the U.K. Long wait periods, people dying in the hospitals, and it even talks about the Veterans Administration which is a true single-payer system. It discusses how harmful it has been to the vets, and how they need privatization so our vets can have the best care.

This is what I talk about so I can educate Americans on this crazy idea about full government takeover of our healthcare system.

Oopsie, looks like that $32 Trillion bill for Medicare for All that Sanders and Ocasio have been bragging about is also 'misleading' or A Lie -

WATCH: CNN's Tapper Fact Checks Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders. It Gets Ugly, Fast

[www.dailywire.com]

CNN's Jake Tapper fact-checked Democratic socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) during a segment that aired on Friday over their claims that a study funded by the Koch brothers showed that universal health care would save the U.S. government money.

Tapper noted that the study, conducted by The Mercatus Center, was written by senior research strategist Charles Blahous, who said that Ocasio-Cortez's and Sanders' claims were not what the report concluded.

"It is likely that the actual cost of Medicare-for-all would be substantially greater than these estimates, which assume significant administrative and drug cost savings under the plan, and also assume that health care providers operating under Medicare-for-all will be reimbursed at rates more than 40 percent lower than those currently paid by private health insurance," Blahous wrote in the paper's abstract, according to factcheck.org.

Tapper said at the beginning of the three-minute clip that CNN was not looking to weigh in as to whether Medicare-for-all was a viable option to be implemented in the U.S., but noted that "it does seem pretty clear that the presentation being made by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about this study lacks a lot of context."

(Watch the Video where he explains how it's a Falsehood)

**************

40% lower payments to providers? A huge number of providers ALREADY refuse to take more Medicare patients because they lose money on them. 40% lower and nobody would take them.