During the confirmation hearings of Rep. Tom Price for the cabinet position of Secretary of Health and Human Services, Sen. Bernie Sanders criticized the American society as “not particularly compassionate” compared to other countries on earth.
The exchange occurred when Sanders, a socialist who came close to securing the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in 2016, asked Price if health care was “a right of all Americans whether they’re rich or poor.” Price began his response by saying, “Yes, we are a compassionate society…” but he was abruptly interrupted by the Vermont senator who launched into a mini-monologue about America’s lack of compassion:
It was nearly boilerplate material from Sanders’ stump speech but it’s the kind of rhetoric that could easily find its way into most of his Democrat colleagues’ talking point on any given day. But is it accurate?
According to a report by Daniel J. Mitchell at the CATO Institute, it couldn’t be farther from the truth. In his essay Americans Are Far More Compassionate than “Socially Conscious” Europeans Mitchell argues that as a society no other country comes close to America’s compassion:
Perhaps Sanders only measures a society’s generosity based on the forced confiscation of wealth and the redistribution of it by the government, but if that’s the case, it would certainly be more accurate for him to say that America does not have a compassionate government, if that is his belief. But, the CATO report blasts away at that argument as well. According to the same data from 2013, America “redistributes 20 percent of GDP in America compared to an average of 21.9 percent of GDP for all OECD nations.”
Price did finally get a chance to respond to Sanders. “If you want to talk about other countries’ health care systems, there are consequences to the decisions they’ve made,” he said. Indeed.
