Mike Bloomberg is gearing up for his second Democratic presidential debate after the first one didn’t go so well. For those of us watching, it will likely be another opportunity to watch his opponents tear into him, and the debate on healthcare will once again really be a debate on the same bad ideas wrapped in slightly different packaging.
Unimpressively, Bloomberg’s grand solutions to our nation’s healthcare problems are an expansion of Obamacare and a new public option akin to “Medicare for all,” or something that would inevitably lead to it.
However, what is interesting is that we’re debating the merits of socialized medicine in our corner of the world, and over in China we’re seeing the full force of it.
There’s a saying in China about the nation’s socialist healthcare system — kan bing nan, kan bing gui (hard to see a doctor, expensive to see a doctor). It’s not the ideal slogan as China battles a massive outbreak of the coronavirus, but as social media and news coverage of the epidemic have shown, it’s an accurate one.
Overcrowded hospitals, patients waiting for care, and corpses left to pile up in hallways — these are some of the images coming out of China (or rather, they were before these citizen journalists were silenced). The health emergency is wreaking havoc on the nation’s government-run healthcare system, and truth be told, the whole fiasco is a sad reminder of the dangers of state-sponsored care.
Yet in the midst of all this devastation, liberals are relentless in their calls for a similar form of state control here—and they’re doing so at their own demise.
Just as a reminder, Americans’ healthcare premiums have more than doubled since 2013 under Obamacare. Countless people have lost access to their doctors. Perhaps worst of all, thousands of critically-ill and disabled people have been pushed to the side, forced to wait for care, while millions of able-bodied adults have enrolled in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. It’s also worth noting that state budgets are now buckling under the financial pressures of this expansion. In New York alone, the state’s Medicaid program is running 16% over budget, leaving taxpayers on the hook for a $4 billion deficit.
We don’t need a national emergency like the coronavirus to distrust the idea of government-run healthcare in the United States. We need only look back at the past few years under Obamacare to see how increased government intervention in the private industry has had catastrophic harm on patients. Still, Bloomberg is championing even more government intervention.
Bloomberg’s version of socialized medicine will undoubtedly risk traditional Medicare benefits for seniors and future beneficiaries. To say that it won’t is disingenuous. Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion has put resources for the truly needy, those for whom Medicaid was originally intended to support, at risk. There’s no question that a similar fate will befall Medicare beneficiaries if Bloomberg gets his way.
At the heart of it, Bloomberg’s socialized medicine plan will not increase access or decrease costs. On the contrary, the plan sounds eerily similar to China’s “hard to see a doctor, expensive to see a doctor” scenario. That’s not what Americans want or need, and liberals are missing the mark by a long shot if they think a socialist utopia is sure to solve all of our troubles.
The amount of pandering to the extreme wing of the Democrat Party is ostracizing many people who are looking for real solutions to our nation’s problems, including healthcare. No amount of spending on campaign ads will convince voters that what we need here is more government-run healthcare, coronavirus or not.
Nick Stehle is Vice President of Communications at the Foundation for Government Accountability.
