It’s time to stop letting insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies be punching bags for cheap-shot demagoguery from Democratic presidential candidates.
It’s also time that the demagogues stopped making the asinine assertion that Republicans actually “want” to “take away” people’s healthcare, as if half the country takes joy in seeing people suffer.
Memo to these economic illiterates who repeatedly blast the “profit motive” of the corporations: It is that profit motive that drives research and development of life-saving drugs. It is that profit motive that creates efficiencies that actually keep prices down and quality up. It is the profit motive which also, yes, creates profits that create dividends for millions upon millions of pensioners whose retirements are made healthier because of those pensions.
The profit motive is what drives all of us, each and every one, to provide something useful that our fellow citizens want. That includes the stockholders behind insurance companies, who could just as easily invest their money elsewhere.
With “Medicare for all,” and thus without a profit motive, bureaucrats will have no galvanizing incentives. They will do for everybody’s healthcare what the Veterans Affairs bureaucrats did in providing substandard care for those who valiantly served under arms.
That’s why Joe Biden makes sense when he says it is “a bunch of malarkey” to suggest that private insurance and pharmaceuticals be destroyed. Biden is right that without the private sector, there will be nowhere near enough money to pay for all his challengers’ pie-in-the-sky plans.
Meanwhile, at least three of these candidates said Republicans or President Trump literally want to take away healthcare. This is slander, pure and simple, and not a single one of them actually believes it. It’s sickening to see politicians ascribe literally evil motives to people across the aisle, rather than just asserting that they’re wrong.
The fact is that for the first time in many, many years, healthcare prices, including drug prices, are actually rising at less than the so-called core inflation rate. The fact is that the Trump administration has made it easier for people to find more ways than before to secure insurance of their choice, by widening the number of allowable plans and by allowing smaller companies to band together to find insurance for their workers.
Maybe the Democrats can do better, although one struggles to see how. It is, however, sheer calumny to say that Republicans are making these efforts not from some sincere desire to help people, but because they want people to be uninsured and untreated.
The behavior of these candidates is shameful and massively unworthy of the presidency.
