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

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 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.

.. 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.

.. I would like to see it fully repealed and then replaced with a plan that empowers patients and doctors, not the federal government.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.  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 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.

.. 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.

There Is a Revolution on the Left. Democrats Are Bracing.

“They need to wake up and pay attention to what people actually want,” Ms. Conner said of Democratic leaders. “There are so many progressive policies that have widespread support that mainstream Democrats are not picking up on, or putting that stuff down and saying, ‘That wouldn’t really work.’”

.. Energized to take on President Trump, these voters are also seeking to remake their own party as a ferocious — and ferociously liberal — opposition force. And many appear as focused on forcing progressive policies into the midterm debate as they are on defeating Republicans.

.. Fifty-three of the 305 candidates have been endorsed by the Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, the Progressive Change Campaign and Our Revolution, organizations that have helped propel challenges to Democratic incumbents.

.. Mr. Brewer, who backs Gretchen Whitmer, a former State Senate leader and the Democratic front-runner for governor, said Michigan Democrats were an ideologically diverse bunch and the party could not expect to win simply by running far to the left.

“There are a lot of moderate and even conservative Democrats in Michigan,” Mr. Brewer cautioned. “It’s always been a challenge for Democrats to hold that coalition together in the general election.”

.. The pressure from a new generation of confrontational progressives has put Democrats at the precipice of a sweeping transition, away from not only the centrist ethos of the Bill Clinton years but also, perhaps, from the consensus-oriented liberalism of Barack Obama. Less than a decade ago, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, derided the “professional left” for making what he suggested were preposterous demands — like pressing for “Canadian health care.”

.. urged Democrats to recognize the intensity of “anger, fear and disappointment from people in our own party,” especially those new to the political process.

“They’re young, and a lot of them are folks that weren’t around or weren’t engaged when Obama ran for the first time,” Mr. Johnson, 36, said. “So this is their moment of: Let’s take our country back.”

.. primary voters have chosen candidates who seem to embody change — many of them women and minorities — but who have not necessarily endorsed positions like single-payer health care and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.

..  Martin O’Malley of Maryland, a left-of-center Democrat who ran for president in 2016, suggested the party wants “new leaders and fresh ideas” more than hard-left ideology.

“Sometimes that may be filled by a leader who calls herself a Democratic socialist, and sometimes it’s not,” said Mr. O’Malley, reflecting on the political convulsion that touched his home state. “Sometimes it’s with a young person. Sometimes it’s with a retiree. Sometimes it’s with a vet.”

.. avowedly moderate standard-bearers, such as Senator Doug Jones of Alabama and Representative Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania

.. among Democratic stalwarts, there is a sometimes-rueful recognition that a cultural gulf separates them from the party’s next generation, much of which inhabits a world of freewheeling social media and countercultural podcasts that are wholly unfamiliar to older Democrats.

.. But within deep-blue precincts where Democratic insurgency appears strongest, talk of accommodating the center is in short supply.