Tag: CNN

The Better Solution for Our Health Insurance System: A Plan You Can Actually Keep

Sometimes, liberals and conservatives agree on a policy problem, but disagree strongly on the best solutions to that problem. Our health insurance system presents one case of such a disconnect between problems and solutions.

In the last Democratic presidential debate, hosted by CNN in March, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said that the coronavirus pandemic made the “dysfunctionality of the current health care system … obviously apparent.” He elaborated in an April op-ed in Politico, in which he noted that “already, an estimated 9.2 million workers have lost their employer-sponsored insurance, and as many as 35 million people might lose coverage by the end of the crisis.”

Sanders makes a valid point: The pandemic does illustrate the shortcomings of our system of health coverage. But his single-payer health care plan — or even Joe Biden’s proposal for a (purportedly) voluntary government-run “option” in which individuals could enroll — would take the system in the exact opposite direction.

The dysfunctionality of the system exists largely because employers control most Americans’ health insurance. Most conservatives would therefore support letting individuals control their health coverage, rather than liberals’ plan to replace employer control with government control. Thankfully, the Trump administration has moved health policy in that exact direction, laying the groundwork for a movement toward more personalized insurance options.

The Problem: Employer-Provided Health Insurance

Sanders cited a study from Health Management Associates stating that as many as 35 million individuals could lose access to employer-sponsored insurance due to coronavirus-related layoffs. A revised paper, released in late May, did not specifically update estimates for the number of people losing employer insurance, but still showed significant coverage losses. Other estimates have indicated similarly large numbers of Americans losing their employer coverage.

The sudden job losses sparked by coronavirus lockdowns have illustrated one of the three major problems with employer-provided health insurance. Individually and collectively, these flaws have represented a problem hidden in plain sight for decades.

Lack of choice: The largest survey of employer-provided health insurance found that in 2019, exactly three-quarters of firms (75%) offered only one type of health insurance plan. In general, large firms offer more choices than small businesses, but even among the largest firms — those with more than 5,000 workers.

Because the employer and not the employee owns the insurance policy, workers often end up stuck with whatever plan their employer chooses. An individual who doesn’t want to enroll in an HMO, or whose doctors lie outside his or her employer’s provider network, might have few choices but to switch jobs or accept a plan that does not meet his or her needs.

In its first season, the U.S. version of “The Office” satirized this dynamic, when resident megalomaniac Dwight Schrute got charged with picking the office health plan — and let the power go to his head. While Americans don’t have to worry about contracting “Count Choculitis,” one of the fictitious diseases Schrute’s co-workers invented to needle him in the episode, they do face the very real worry that their employer’s choices and wishes regarding health care might not align with their own.

Flawed incentives: A conversation with one of my friends several years ago illustrated this problem. My friend said he loved the insurance plan his employer provided: “I can go to the doctor and it only costs me a $5 co-pay.”

I posed a thought experiment: What if your health insurance suddenly became taxable, and you had to pay $1,500 or so in taxes on that coverage? (At the time, a top-of-the-line plan cost about $6,000 for an individual, and I assumed a 25% state and local tax rate.) He responded immediately: “I wouldn’t want the plan — I would tell them to raise my co-pays and deductibles.”

That response illustrates the policy problem of employer-sponsored insurance: Everyone thinks they’re spending everyone else’s money. Employees don’t pay taxes on employer coverage; an IRS ruling during World War II, later codified by Congress, exempts employer-provided benefits from both income and payroll taxes.

All the incentives regarding employer-provided health care point in the wrong direction. Exempting employer coverage from taxation encourages individuals to take more compensation in untaxed health insurance benefits rather than taxable wages. Many employees don’t even realize that the employer’s share of the contribution for their coverage — which averaged nearly $15,000 for a family policy in 2019 — comes out of their own wallets in the form of lost wages.

All the flawed and misaligned incentives mean that the co-pay of “only” $5 my friend talked about years ago costs far more than that — to workers, employers and the economy as a whole. It’s one major reason why our health care system represents such a large, and rising, share of our economy.

Lack of portability: This issue arises because employers and not individuals own their health plans. As a result, when individuals lose their jobs, they also lose their health coverage. That dynamic results in the double whammy Americans have experienced during the pandemic, when workers lose their coverage at the same time they have unexpectedly lost their job — compounding families’ financial distress.

Lack of portability also exacerbates the problem of pre-existing conditions. Upon entering the workforce in their teens or 20s, most individuals have yet to develop a pre-existing condition like cancer or diabetes. But every time individuals switch jobs, they lose their employer-provided health coverage — making them vulnerable if they have developed a condition in the intervening time.

The worst kinds of situations occur when individuals must leave their jobs because they have become too sick to work. These patients face not one but two potential sources of financial ruin: They have lost their source of income, and face the prospect of astronomical medical bills without a means to fund them.

Cure the Disease, Not the Symptoms

In the past several years, Democrats have spent lots of time talking about the need to protect individuals with pre-existing conditions. But in focusing on pre-existing conditions, the left focuses on the symptom, rather than the underlying problem.

Remember: When Obamacare went into effect in January 2014, at least 4.7 million individuals received cancellation notices, according to The Associated Press. These individuals had plans that they liked, and wanted to keep — but the Obama administration wouldn’t let them. Politifact called the promise that Americans could keep their plan the 2013 “Lie of the Year,” and that lie affected many individuals who had developed, or feared that they would develop, a pre-existing condition. Let’s spare the notion that Democrats want to “protect” people with pre-existing conditions, when they “protected” millions of people right out of their coverage.

Liberals don’t talk about the underlying policy issue that creates the pre-existing condition problem — that people don’t own their own health coverage — because they don’t want people to own their own insurance. They want Washington to control health care decisions, not individual patients. It’s the classic example of former President Ronald Reagan’s nine most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

But if individuals could buy an insurance policy upon joining the workforce — one that they owned, not their employer — and retain that policy from job to job for decades, most individuals could buy coverage well before they develop a pre-existing condition, and keep that coverage after they do so, the pre-existing condition problem would rapidly diminish. (Yes, a small percentage of Americans, most notably those born with congenital illnesses, develop pre-existing conditions very early in life, but other policy solutions can address this population.)

Trump Administration’s Solution

You wouldn’t know it, given all the carping and hostility from the left, but the Trump administration has put forward a very positive solution that answers the policy problems associated with employer-provided health coverage. It should increase portability in ways that help solve the pre-existing condition problem, while also providing additional choice and competition.

The administration’s policy, implemented through regulations finalized in 2019, allows employers to contribute funds to workers on a pre-tax basis through Health Reimbursement Arrangements. These HRAs allow individuals to purchase coverage that they own, not their employers — making the coverage portable from job to job.

The HRA concept provides wins for employers, employees and the economy as a whole:

• Employers get predictability when it comes to their health insurance offerings. By providing employees a fixed sum (say, $300 or $500 a month) into the HRA, they will not have to worry about changing plans from year to year, a sudden spike in costs because of a sick employee, or many of the other paperwork hassles associated with offering coverage.
• Employees get both choice and portability. They can select the insurance plan that best meets their needs — the doctors, deductibles and plan features that they want. Not only can they keep the plan when they switch jobs, the fact that they and not their employer chose the coverage in the first place will make them more likely to do so.
• The economy will benefit from individuals selecting the plans they want, rather than the plans employers select for them. Insurers will have to provide better, more customized plans that fit individuals’ needs, and employees will have incentives to make better choices to stretch the HRA dollars their employers provide them.

Ideally, Congress would amend the law regarding Health Savings Accounts, to allow individuals to use HSA dollars to fund health insurance premiums. Because HSA funds cannot pay insurance premiums in most cases under current law, the Trump administration had to use Health Reimbursement Arrangements (which are owned by employers) rather than Health Savings Accounts (which are always owned by individuals) to fund individual coverage.

Providing contributions via an HSA, as opposed to an HRA, would allow employees to control any unused employer contributions upon leaving a job. That way, individuals would not only have a source of coverage in the event of a layoff, they could develop a source of savings to pay for that coverage while unemployed. But until Congress acts, the Trump administration’s Health Reimbursement Arrangement regulations represent a tremendous step forward toward a more logical, patient-centered insurance system.

Empower Patients, Not Government

Coronavirus has made the problems with government control of health care apparent. As Joe Biden (of all people) noted in the March CNN debate, Italy has a single-payer system — and that nation had to ration access to ventilators, whereas the United States did not.

The pandemic has exposed the flaws in our health insurance system. But it comes just as the Trump administration has shown a better path forward. By empowering patients rather than government bureaucrats, Health Reimbursement Arrangements can help transform the coverage system into something that lowers costs and provides the care American patients prefer.

This post was originally published at the Daily Caller’s American Renewal blog.

Michael Bloomberg: Against Obamacare Before He Was For It

Last week, old footage emerged of former New York City mayor, and current Democratic presidential candidate, Michael Bloomberg talking about health care rationing. In his comments from 2011, he advocated denying costly care to older patients:

If you’re bleeding, they’ll stop the bleeding—if you need an X-ray, you’re going to have to wait. That’s just…All of these costs keep going up, nobody wants to pay any more money, and at the rate we’re going, health care is going to bankrupt us….You know, if you show up with prostate cancer, you’re 95 years old, we should say, ‘Go and enjoy. Have a nice life. Live a long life. There’s no cure, and we can’t do anything.’ If you’re a young person, we should do something about it.

Perhaps more important is why Bloomberg made those particular comments. At the time, in February 2011, he was paying condolences to a Jewish family that had lost a loved one. One of the deceased man’s family noted that the man “was in the emergency room for 73 hours before he died and…that overcrowding in emergency rooms in New York had become out of control.”

This entire episode undermines the message of Bloomberg’s current ad blitz claiming that as mayor, he expanded access to health care in New York City. Plus, what did the mayor say about ER overcrowding back in 2011? “It’s going to get worse with the health care bill [i.e., Obamacare].” He also predicted that hospitals would close as a result.

Obamacare a ‘Disgrace’

During last week’s Democrat primary debate in Las Vegas, former Vice President Joe Biden brought up some of Bloomberg’s other comments about Obamacare. Biden correctly noted that Bloomberg had called Obamacare a “disgrace.” In a June 2010 speech at Dartmouth University just after the law’s enactment, Bloomberg said “We passed a health care bill that does absolutely nothing to fix the big health care problems in this country. It is just a disgrace.”

Reporters in the past several days have highlighted some of Bloomberg’s prior comments about the law:

  • In his Dartmouth speech, Bloomberg also pointed out that Democrats “say they’ve insured or provided coverage for another 45 million people…except there’s no more doctors for 45 million people.”
  • In a 2011 radio appearance, Bloomberg said that Obamacare “did not solve the basic problems, two basic problems with health care, which…got lost in all of the negotiations as every special interest in Congress got a piece or lost a piece or negotiated about a piece.”
  • In a December 2009 appearance on “Meet the Press,” Bloomberg criticized Democrats for not reading or understanding the legislation: “I have asked congressperson after congressperson, not one can explain to me what’s in the bill, even in the House version, certainly not in the other version. And so for them to vote on a bill that they don’t understand whatsoever, really, you’ve got to question the kind of government we have.”

It’s notable that Biden didn’t mention Bloomberg’s last quote—about members of Congress not reading or understanding the legislation—in Wednesday’s debate. Of course, that might have something to do with Biden’s own recent admission that “no one did understand Obamacare”—presumably including himself, at the time the vice president of the United States.

Changing His Tune

Now that Bloomberg is running for the Democratic nomination, he’s come around to supporting Obamacare. When asked about his prior comments, a Bloomberg campaign spokesman told CNN Obamacare’s only flaw lay in the fact that it didn’t go far enough. As a result, Bloomberg’s health plan proposes more government spending, funded by higher taxes, and—in a first—price controls on the entire health-care sector, including what you can and cannot pay your doctors.

On the merits of his policy platform, I’ll give the last word to Bloomberg himself, in his June 2010 speech at Dartmouth University. While Bloomberg said President Obama started out with good intentions, he said Congress “didn’t pay attention to any of those big problems and just created another program that’s going to cost a lot of money.”

It’s an apt description of Bloomberg’s own health care plan—to say nothing of his competitors for the Democratic presidential nomination.

This post was originally published at The Federalist.

In Fourth Dem Debate, Warren Maintains Her Health Care Evasion

On Tuesday, Sen. Sherrod Brown—a notable leftist who has said he supports a single-payer health care system in theory—said in a CNN story that “it’s a terrible mistake if the Democratic nominee would publicly support ‘Medicare for All.’” On Tuesday evening, two of the party’s leading contenders for that nomination, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, redoubled their commitment to such a policy, with Warren drawing fire from all sides about her lack of detail surrounding the issue.

As she had in previous debates, Warren refused to get into specifics about how she would pay for the single-payer plan that Sanders has introduced as legislation, and which Warren has endorsed. Sanders has previously admitted that taxes on the middle class would go up under his plan.

Warren would not admit that taxes on the middle class would go up under single payer. She claimed that costs for the middle class would go down on net under her plan, and that she would not sign any legislation that raised costs on the middle class.

However, even this supposed promise raised additional questions:

  1. Who qualifies as middle class in Warren’s estimation? A family making under $50,000, a family making under $250,000, or somewhere in between?
  2. Does Warren’s promise mean that no middle-class families will see their costs go up on net? If so, that seems like an impossibly high bar to clear, as virtually every major law creates both winners and losers. Even though the left tries to turn the federal government into another version of “Oprah’s Finest Things”—“You get a car! You get a car! You get a car!”—it rarely works out that way in practice.
  3. In September 2008, Barack Obama made a “firm pledge” that he would not raise taxes on families making under $250,000 per year—“not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” That promise lasted for less than a month of his administration. On February 4, 2009, two weeks after taking office, Obama signed a children’s health insurance reauthorization that included a large increase in tobacco taxes—taxes that hit working class families hardest. Given how quickly Obama did an about-face on his campaign promise, why should the American people take Warren’s word any more seriously than they did Obama’s “firm pledge?”

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg also chimed in on the funding discussion. He had previously characterized Warren as “extremely evasive” on the issue during the last debate, and released ads prior to this debate questioning Warren’s and Sanders’ proposals to prohibit private health insurance. During the CNN debate, he pressed both issues, noting (as this commentator has) that Warren has “a plan for everything, except this.” With that, Warren derided Pete’s plan as “Medicare for all who can afford it.”

It seems particularly noteworthy that Warren wants to enact a major expansion of the federal government’s role—the largest expansion of government’s role ever, in both its financial scope and massive reach into every American’s life—yet cannot find a sufficient justification to admit the middle class will pay even a little bit more in taxes to fund this socialist utopia. The former speaks volumes about the left’s ultimate objective—full, unfettered power over the economy—and the latter speaks to the deception they are using to obtain it.

This post was originally published at The Federalist.

Will Single-Payer Health Care Help Ruin the Planet?

To promote his single-payer health care legislation, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders recently sent an interesting tweet: “Average cost of childbirth in the United States: $32,000. Average cost of childbirth with Medicare for All: $0.” However, the left’s general position on population growth’s effect on the climate make one wonder why Sanders and his single-payer supporters want to facilitate additional births, whether in the United States or overseas.

As one might expect, Sanders’ tweet contained several oversimplifications and mis-statements. First, his “Medicare for All” bill would actually abolish the Medicare program. Second, the 2013 report to which Sanders referred studied the charges medical providers submitted, not just for childbirth, but for all prenatal and postpartum care. While doctors and hospitals charged patients an average of $32,063 for this year’s worth of care before and after a vaginal childbirth, insurers paid far less ($18,329)—and consumers paid only $2,244 out-of-pocket.

Not one week before Sanders sent his tweet, he addressed the topic of population growth at a CNN climate forum. A member of the audience said that “human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years. The planet cannot sustain this growth.” In talking about “the need to curb population growth,” she asked Sanders if he would “be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate change?” Sanders responded in the affirmative, then proceeded to highlight the need for abortion and contraception, both in the United States and overseas.

In his CNN appearance, Sanders echoed statements by other leftist leaders. In February, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) asked what she considered “a legitimate question: Is it okay to still have children,” given that “there’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult?”

Following Ocasio-Cortez’ comments, Vox highlighted “a growing discussion about the ethics of having children,” due to the “a genuine concern of many young prospective parents today” about the effects of climate change. It included some questions that prospective parents have asked themselves about having children, including “how much time do I have to make a decision” to see if carbon emissions decline rapidly, and “what kinds of signals would I be sending” by making an environmental statement to eschew parenthood.

Leftists like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, and forums like Vox, have given voice to millennials seeking to avoid procreation, whether to hypothetically save the planet, avoid a dystopian future for their potential offspring, or a combination of the two. But few outlets on the left have reconciled their belief in the need to slow population growth to save the planet with their support for a single-payer system that—according to Sanders’ own statements—would encourage population growth by making it financially easier for parents to have children.

The conservative case against Sanders’ proposal encompasses the taxes, regulations, and government control necessary to create a single-payer health system. But liberals who claim to have a single-minded focus on the climate crisis should oppose single payer as well, due to the ecological effects that would logically follow.

This post was originally published at The Federalist.

Democrats Debate How to Give “Free” Stuff to More People

The first night of this month’s Democratic debates provided rapid-fire exchanges on health care, made more complicated by CNN debate moderators who rarely gave candidates time to explain their positions clearly. But the overall tenor of the debate seemed clear: Promising free stuff to voters.

Health care consumed a fair portion of the debate’s first hour. Following lengthy exchanges in the first segment, another extended discussion on electability in the second segment revolved around health care—specifically the provision in Sen. Bernie Sanders’ single-payer bill that would make private health coverage “unlawful.”

Sanders and his fellow Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sparred with other, more moderate candidates—Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), Rep. John Delaney (D-MD), and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg—about the feasibility of banning the private coverage that most Americans currently have, and like. Warren won applause from the audience, and likely from the liberal base, with her (self-)righteous anger at these criticisms, decrying Democrats’ use of “Republican talking points” about “taking away health care,” and attacking Delaney for “talk[ing] about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for.”

But partisan attacks aside, the debates showed more similarities than differences, on two key fronts. First, even candidates like Buttigieg and former congressman Robert Francis O’Rourke (D-TX) said they want to move everyone onto a government-run health plan—they just want to do it in a slower and more subtle fashion than Sanders.

When Buttigieg argued that a government-run “public option” would get to single payer eventually, he meant that he would sabotage private coverage to force people into the government system over time. After all, Democrats wouldn’t support the creation of such an “option” if they didn’t think it would lead to huge enrollment, which they believe can become a self-fulfilling prophecy through policy bias.

Yet while Sanders sponsored the legislation, he obviously has not read it, calling his proposal “Medicare for All” even though it would explicitly abolish the current Medicare program. Sanders also claimed yet again that his proposal would make health care a human right, even though it would do no such thing. People would have the “right” to have their care paid for if they can find a doctor who will treat them, but they have no explicit “right” to care under his bill.

In a similar manner, Warren refused to admit, despite repeated questioning from the CNN anchors, that taxes on the middle class would go up to pay for everyone’s “free” health care. She pledged that total costs would go down, an implicit acknowledgement of the obvious fact that wealthy individuals alone cannot fund a government-run health system costing trillions of dollars annually. But she, like her California Senate colleague Kamala Harris, somehow wants to keep up the fiction that middle-class families can consume all the health care they want without having to pay for any of it in taxes.

Ultimately, one key winner emerged from the debate: Donald Trump. Moderate candidates who have little shot at winning the nomination took multiple shots at the party’s leftward lurch that the Trump campaign can easily exploit next summer and fall.

The more Democrats keep pushing farther and farther to the left—with the debate on outlawing private health insurance a prime example—the better the president’s chances of winning re-election. Given the tenor of Tuesday’s discussion, the Trump campaign should offer to host, and pay for, another debate for Democratic candidates, as soon as possible.

This post was originally published at The Federalist.

How Democratic Health Proposals Will Take Your Coverage Away

Following her performance in last week’s Democratic presidential debates, California Senator Kamala Harris once again tripped up over the issue of health care. For a second time, Harris attempted to claim that she would not eliminate private health coverage. In reality, however, virtually all Democrats running for president would enact policies jeopardizing Americans’ health insurance. The candidates differ largely in their level of honesty about their proposals’ effects.

During the debates on Wednesday and Thursday, only Harris, New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said they supported eliminating private insurance. But in an interview Friday morning, Harris claimed she heard the question as asking whether she would give up her insurance, not whether she would take others’ coverage away.

The facts defy Harris’ lawyerly parsing. Section 107(a) of the bill that Sanders introduced, and which Harris, Warren, and New Jersey’s Cory Booker have co-sponsored, would make it “unlawful for a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided” under the legislation.

In May, Harris claimed that Sanders’ legislation would permit private health insurance to supplement the government-run program. But as CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out at the time, Sanders’ bill would provide such comprehensive benefits that supplemental coverage could only cover treatments like cosmetic surgery. It raises an obvious question: Who would want to buy “insurance” covering breast implants and Botox injections? Harris’ Hollywood constituents, perhaps, but few middle-class Americans.

Other candidates have similarly tried to disguise their intentions when it comes to taking away Americans’ health coverage. During last week’s debates, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand—another co-sponsor of Sanders’ legislation to make private coverage “unlawful”—did not raise her hand when asked about eliminating health insurance. She said she supported a government-run “public option” instead: “I believe we need to get to…single payer. The quickest way you get there is you create competition with the insurers.”

But individuals with private coverage cannot, and should not, rest easy. The fact that Gillibrand says she supports a government-run health system as an eventual outcome means that she would work to sabotage the private health insurance system, to drive all Americans into a government-run program.

Even Democratic candidates who claim they oppose Sanders’ single-payer legislation have proposed policies that would eventually lead to such a government-run health system. In Thursday’s debate, Sen. Michael Bennet claimed that his proposal for a “public option” “could easily” see 35 million people enroll. Bennet proved off in his estimate by only about 100 million individuals. In 2009, the Lewin Group estimated that a plan similar to Bennet’s could enroll as many as 131.2 million Americans.

A review of Bennet’s legislation demonstrates how it would sabotage private coverage, by giving the government plan major structural advantages. Bennett’s bill grants the government plan $1 billion in start-up funding from taxpayers—with additional bailout funds likely should the plan ever run into financial distress. It would require all doctors participating in Medicare to join the government plan. And it would pay doctors and hospitals the much lower rates that Medicare pays, even though nearly three-quarters of hospitals lost money on their Medicare patients in 2017.

Among the Democrats running for president, Sanders has remained outspoken in his desire to take away Americans’ health coverage, and ban private insurance. While most of the other candidates say that they want to preserve private coverage, their policies would do the exact opposite. Just as Barack Obama eventually had to apologize for his infamous “If you like your plan, you can keep it” broken promise, so too will most of this year’s candidates have to explain why American families couldn’t keep their insurance if and when their policy plans go into effect.

In accepting his party’s nomination for president at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale infamously claimed that “[Ronald] Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you; I just did.” Thirty-five years later, virtually all Democrats have embraced a position almost as unpopular as raising taxes: Taking away Americans’ health insurance. Unlike Mondale, most of this year’s candidates won’t tell you the full truth about their policies. I just did.

This post was originally published at Fox News.

Democrats Agree: Free Health Coverage for Undocumented Immigrants

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then three series of pictures, featuring Democrats discussing health benefits for those in this country illegally, speak volumes. First, Hillary Clinton in September 1993:

Finally, Democratic candidates for president last night:

Whereas Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg called coverage for illegal immigrants an “insurance program” and “not a hand out,” Clinton said in 1993—well before the most recent waves of migration—that “we do not want to do anything to encourage more illegal immigration into this country. We know now that too many people come in for medical care, as it is. We certainly don’t want them having the same benefits that American citizens are entitled to have.”

Likewise, whereas Joe Biden said “you cannot let people who are sick, no matter where they come from, no matter what their status, go uncovered,” the president whom he worked for promised the American people that “the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” Granted, the promise had a major catch to it—Obamacare verifies citizenship but not identity, allowing people here illegally to obtain benefits using fraudulent documents—but at least he felt the need to make the pledge in the first place. No longer.

Ironically enough, even as all Democrats supported giving coverage to illegally present foreigners, the candidates seemed less united on whether, how, and from whom to take health insurance away from U.S. citizens. Only Sens. Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders said they supported abolishing private health insurance, as Sanders’ single-payer bill would do (and as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged on Wednesday evening). For Harris, it represents a return to her position of January, after fudging the issue in a follow-up interview with CNN last month.

As usual, Sanders made typically hyperbolic—and false—claims about his plan. He said that his bill would make health care a human right, even though it does no such thing. In truth, the legislation guarantees that individuals would have their bills paid for—but only if they can find a doctor or hospital willing to treat them.

While Sanders pledged that under his bill, individuals could go to whatever doctor or hospital they wished, such a promise has two main flaws. First, his bill does not—and arguably, the federal government cannot—force a given doctor to treat a given patient. Second, given the reimbursement reductions likely under single payer, many doctors could decide to leave the profession altogether.

Sanders’ home state provided a reality check during the debate. Candidates critical of single payer noted that Vermont had to abandon its dream of socialized medicine in 2014, when the tax increases needed to fund such a program proved too overwhelming.

Shumlin gave his fellow Democrats a valuable lesson. Based on the radical, and radically unaffordable, proposals discussed in this week’s debates—from single-payer health care, to coverage for undocumented immigrants, to “free” college and student loan forgiveness, and on and on—they seem hellbent on ignoring it.

This post was originally published at The Federalist.

This Presidential Candidate Loves Obamacare–But Won’t Sign Up for It

If the 2020 presidential campaign illustrates anything so far, it’s the yawning chasm between Democrats’ rhetoric and their reality. Not only do the party’s presidential candidates not practice what they preach, they seemingly have little shame in failing to do so.

Last Thursday evening, one of the candidates running for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), appeared on CNN for a town hall discussion. During the discussion, Bennet criticized his fellow senator and presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders (I-VT), for his single-payer health-care plan.

Qualifies for Obamacare Subsidy, Yet Won’t Buy a Plan

In his town hall comments, Bennet claimed that “what we would be better off doing in order to get to universal health care quickly is to finish the job we started with” Obamacare. Yet consider this paragraph from Bennet’s op-ed the week previously, in which he outlined health care, and his recent prostate cancer diagnosis, as the reason for announcing his candidacy: “My cancer was treatable because it was detected through preventive care. The $94,000 bill didn’t bankrupt my family because I had insurance through my wife’s employer” (emphasis mine).

Remember: The federal Office of Personnel Management promulgated an arguably illegal rule in October 2013 that makes members of Congress eligible for subsidies for Obamacare coverage. Yet even with access to these illegal subsidies, Bennet has no interest in buying an Obamacare plan. That might be because he knows—as I do by being forced onto an exchange plan—that these Obamacare plans are junk insurance, with high premiums, high deductibles, and in many cases poor access to physician networks.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Some may argue that because Bennet does not support Sanders’s single-payer proposal, at least he will not force others to give up their health coverage (even as he refuses to go on to Obamacare). But in 2009, one analysis of a government-run “public option,” which Bennet supports as an alternative to single-payer, concluded that it would lead to a reduction in private insurance coverage of 119.1 million people. This would shrink the employer-provided insurance market by more than half.

Even Bennet’s “moderate” proposal could lead to many millions of Americans immediately losing the coverage they have if employers drop coverage en masse. Yet will Bennet give up his employer coverage and go on to Obamacare? Not a chance.

Some may question why I write about this topic so often. After all, if every member of Congress, or every Democratic presidential candidate, suddenly decided to sign up for Obamacare, it wouldn’t significantly affect the exchange’s overall premiums and coverage numbers. But lawmakers’ coverage decisions have outsized importance because they reveal their true motivations.

Obama’s action, however, represents the exception that proves the rule. Instead, liberals want to order other people to buy Obamacare health insurance while not doing so themselves. They epitomize Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” in which he referred to a “little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital,” who believe they “can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

By promising to expand Obamacare even as he fails to enroll in it himself, Bennet demonstrated himself part and parcel of that “little intellectual elite.” So have his fellow Democratic presidential candidates. Americans should take note—and vote accordingly next November.

This post was originally published at The Federalist.

Kamala Harris vs. Hillary Clinton on Benefits to Immigrants

Back in January, jaws dropped when presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) admitted at a CNN town hall that she wanted to take away the existing health arrangements of hundreds of millions of Americans. Now we know one reason why.

In another interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Harris admitted that she wants to provide taxpayer-funded health care, along with education and other benefits, to individuals unlawfully present in this country. But as even Hillary Clinton recognized, doing so wouldn’t just cost precious taxpayer dollars. It will also encourage individuals to migrate to the United States for “free” health care.

In the interview, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Harris about language in Section 102(a) of the House and Senate single-payer bills, which would make health coverage available to all individuals present in the United States, regardless of their legal status. When questioned whether she supported granting benefits “to people who are in this country illegally,” Harris responded unequivocally that she does: “Let me just be very clear about this. I am opposed to any policy that would deny in our country any human being from access to public safety, public education or public health, period.”

Compare Harris’ response to the words of none other than Hillary Clinton. When testifying before Congress about her health-care task force’s plan in September 1993, Clinton said she opposed extending benefits to “illegal aliens,” because it would encourage additional migration to the United States:

We do not think the comprehensive health care benefits should be extended to those who are undocumented workers and illegal aliens. We do not want to do anything to encourage more illegal immigration into this country. We know now that too many people come in for medical care, as it is. We certainly don’t want them having the same benefits that American citizens are entitled to have.

Clinton may not want illegally present foreign citizens having the same benefits that American citizens would be entitled to under single payer, but Harris does.

The problems sparked by single payer would reach far beyond undocumented foreigners living in this country. To wit, both the House and Senate single-payer bills prohibit individuals from traveling “for the sole purpose of obtaining health care” from the new government-run system. But note the specific wording: It only prohibits foreign citizens from traveling for the sole purpose of receiving health care.

This extremely permissive language would give federal officials fits. So long as anyone states some other purpose—visiting the U.S. Capitol, for instance, or seeing a Broadway play—for his or her visit, the language in the bills would make it impossible to deny these foreign citizens health care funded by U.S. taxpayers.

Provisions like these would not just cost American taxpayer dollars, it would also cost the U.S. health-care system. Growth in benefit tourism would greatly increase demand for health care (as would many other provisions in a single-payer system). Because of this greater demand, American citizens would have an increasingly difficult time accessing care. Foreign residents may not like waiting for care either, but individuals from developing countries lacking access to advanced health treatments might find queues for care in this country far preferable to no care at all in their native land.

Don’t Insult Americans’ Intelligence

In the same CNN interview that aired Sunday, Harris also tried, albeit unconvincingly, to “clean up” her January comments about “mov[ing] on” from private insurance. She claimed to Tapper that single-payer legislation would not fully eliminate private insurance. However, host Tapper rightly pointed out that supplemental insurance could only cover the very few services that the government-run plan would not, like cosmetic surgery.

Tapper also asked Harris about the unions that have health plans that they like now, not least because they gave up pay raises in prior years to keep rich health benefits. Harris could only concede that “it’s a legitimate concern which must be addressed.” I’m sure that those individuals facing the loss of their health coverage feel better, because Harris has officially dubbed their concern “legitimate.”

Note to Harris: Legal hair-splitting about whether single payer bars all health insurance, or just virtually all health insurance, and patronizing constituents fearful of losing their coverage, doesn’t seem like the best way to win support for a government takeover of health care. Perhaps next time she gives an interview with Tapper, she will finally have an answer for why she wants to give benefits to individuals unlawfully present, while taking coverage away from nearly 300 million Americans.

This post was originally published at The Federalist.

This New Democratic Plan Would Ban Private Medicine

A few months ago, Sen. Kamala Harris raised eyebrows when she nonchalantly proclaimed her desire to abolish private health insurance: “Let’s move on.” Today, Ms. Harris’s quip seems quaint. The latest liberal policy idea would effectively end all private health care for many Americans.

The proposal, the Medicare for America Act, first appeared as a 2018 paper by the Center for American Progress. It was a plan to expand government-run health care. It’s been called “the Democratic establishment’s alternative” to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s single-payer scheme. In March, Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke endorsed Medicare for America in lieu of the Sanders plan.

CNN declared that Mr. O’Rourke’s endorsement of Medicare for America demonstrates his “moderate path,” but the bill is anything but moderate. When Rep. Rosa DeLauro reintroduced Medicare for America legislation on May 1, she included a new, radical provision. The revised bill prohibits any medical provider “from entering into a private contract with an individual enrolled under Medicare for America for any item or service coverable under Medicare for America.” Essentially, this would bar program enrollees from paying for health care using their own money.

Liberals might claim this prohibition is more innocuous than it sounds, because Americans can still use private insurance under Medicare for America in some circumstances. But the legislation squeezes out the private insurance market in short order.

For starters, the law would automatically enroll babies in the new government program at birth. The Center for American Progress’s original paper admitted that the auto-enrollment language would ensure the government-run plan “would continue to grow in enrollment over time.” The bill would permit people to opt out of the government program only if they have “qualified health coverage” from an employer. And even employer-provided health insurance would soon disappear.

Under the bill, employees would be able to enroll in the government program without penalty, but their employers would have to pay a fee as soon as even one employee opts into the government insurance. It makes little sense to keep paying to provide private health coverage if you already have to pay for the public option. Small employers would get to choose between paying nothing for health care or shelling out enough for “qualified health coverage.” The migration of workers and firms into Medicare for America would be a flood more than a trickle, creating a de facto single-payer system.

With everyone enrolled in Medicare for America, truly private health care would cease to exist. You could obtain heavily regulated coverage from private insurers, similar to the Medicare Advantage plans currently available to seniors. But going to a doctor and paying $50 or $100 cash for a visit? That would be illegal.

Doctors would no longer be permitted to treat patients without the involvement of government bureaucrats. The thousands of direct primary-care physicians currently operating on a “cash and carry” basis would either have to change their business model entirely and join the government program or disappear.

Medicare for America is unique in this particular provision. Under current law, seniors in Medicare can privately contract with physicians, albeit with significant restrictions. Doctors who see Medicare patients privately must agree not to charge any patients through Medicare for two years. The House and Senate single-payer bills, while banning private health insurance entirely, would retain something approaching these current restrictions for people seeking private health care.

Rather than empowering Americans to get the health care they want, Democrats are intent on forcing them to buy what liberals say is best. They would give the government massive power over medicine—but patients would have none of their own.

This post was originally published in The Wall Street Journal.