From Thomas Sowell (born 1930) American economist and political commentator, Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays (2006):
It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer “universal health care.”
Ann Coulter proposes the only universal health care plan that makes any sense. From Coulter at anncoulter.com:
The first sentence of Congress’ Obamacare repeal should read: “There shall be a free market in health insurance.”
Right there, I’ve solved the health insurance crisis for 90 percent of Americans. Unfortunately, no one can imagine what a free market in health care looks like because we haven’t had one for nearly a century.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” this weekend, for example, Chuck Todd told Sen. Tom Cotton that his proposal to create affordable health care that would be widely available, “sounds good,” but “do you understand why some people think that’s an impossible promise to keep?”
(The “do you understand …?” formulation is a condescension reserved only for conservatives, whose disagreement with liberals is taken as a sign of stupidity.)
Todd continued: “To make it affordable, making it wider, I mean, that just seems like — you know, it seems like you’re selling something that can’t be done realistically.”
Dream Sequence: Chuck Todd on Russia’s “Meet the Press” after the fall of the Soviet Union: “Do you understand why some people think that’s an impossible promise to keep? To make bread affordable, making it wider, I mean, that just seems like — you know, it seems like you’re selling something that can’t be done realistically.”
It turns out that, outside of a communist dictatorship, all sorts of products are affordable AND widely available! We don’t need Congress to “provide” us with health care any more than we need them to “provide” us with bread. What we need is for health insurance to be available on the free market.
With lots of companies competing for your business, basic health insurance would cost about $50 a month. We know the cost because Christian groups got a waiver from Obamacare, and that’s how much their insurance costs right now. (Under the law, it can’t be called “insurance,” but that’s what it is.)
To continue reading: How to Provide Universal Health Care Using This One Weird Trick
From Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin:
I am not going to undermine the hope of achieving critically important health care reforms for this state by pushing prematurely for single payer when it is not the right time for Vermont. In my judgment, now is not the right time to ask our legislature to take the step of passing a financing plan for Green Mountain Care.”
Vermont was scheduled to roll out its own single payer plan in 2017. However, the plan would have required an 11.5 percent payroll tax as an additional income tax ranging up to 9.5 percent. Shumlin’s announcement was recognition of the obvious: such taxes would plunge Vermont’s already slow-to-recover economy back into recession.
Pushing for single payer health care when the time isn’t right and it might hurt our economy would not be good for Vermont and it would not be good for true health care reform. It could set back for years all of our hard work toward the important goal of universal, publicly-financed health care for all.
Let’s hope it sets back forever that important goal of universal, publicly-financed health care for all, in Vermont or anywhere else in the United States.
