Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 138 | Health Care

Episode Date: July 17, 2019

Health care-for-all, Medicare-for-all — what are they? Should we want them?

Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. I hope everyone is having a wonderful day. Today we're going to talk about a very exciting subject, which is healthcare and health care insurance. Isn't that, isn't that fun? Aren't you so pumped to be talking about this? I am. Just kidding. I am excited to talk about it. I'm always excited to talk to you guys. The reason that we're talking about healthcare, even though it doesn't sound like that exciting of a topic, is because it's a very popular subject. right now among presidential candidates, particularly Democratic presidential candidates. And it has been for quite a few years because the fact of the matter is, frankly, people don't really know what health care coverage is, how it is distributed, how to pay for it.

And so there's a lot of confusion about this industry. And I will say that I'm not going to offer all of the clarity that a human being can give on the health care industry. Why? Because I myself am not an expert. And like in all of these things, I am coming from a very well research perspective to gain all of the knowledge that I possibly can, the most truthful and holistic perspective that I possibly can. But I'm not a healthcare professional. I am not an insurance professional. And so I'm going to tell you all that I can from all of the research that I've gathered. But as always, please feel free to fact check me. Those of you who may be

are in this industry and know all about government subsidized healthcare and what that plan is, insurance, healthcare, all of this stuff. If you want to correct me, fact check me, send me an email, please do so. I love to learn more from you guys, but know that I'm at least, at the very least, going into this, having done a lot of research and trying to give you the full perspective that I possibly can from my position. and we are going to talk about what the Democrats think about health care. We say health care. We really mean health care coverage.

We really mean insurance, how people are going to pay for health care. Health care really isn't the topic of debate. It's health care coverage, how people are covered, how people are insured, how people pay for health care. So that's also important. It sounds like a small difference. It's not. When people say health care is a human right, that's different than saying health care,

coverage is a human right. But you might hear me say health care sometimes just as a shortened way of saying health care insurance, but no, that's essentially what we're talking about. So you might be in high school. You might be in college. And if so, you're probably on your parents' insurance. You can remain on your parents' insurance until you're 26 years old. Maybe your parents don't want you to remain on their insurance when you get your first job,

maybe when you're 21 or 22. But you might be on your parents' insurance. So you might not know all that much about how our insurance system works. or maybe you're in your 40s, 50s, and 60s, and you still don't really know how health care coverage works, and that is all good. No matter what, we're going to go through the basics together, and we're going to talk about Medicare for all,

we're going to talk about health care for all, we're going to talk about the current U.S. system, and the very good-sounding promise that Bernie Sanders and other Democratic presidential candidates are offering that health care coverage will be free, and it'll make our lives so much better. We are going to see if that is actually, true. So first, let us talk about what the U.S. healthcare, well, let me say something first.

Let me say something first. Because maybe you're listening to this episode on a recommendation of a friend. And you are either in the middle, maybe you're even center left, maybe you're even far left. And if so, I welcome you. And I just want to give you a pat on the back and maybe even a hug if you would let me for being here, knowing that this is a conservative podcast, you are opening up your mind to a different side of the debate. And I really respect that, no matter what your views are. So let me just say, though, that neither side, okay, neither side to you, my new liberal friend wants people to die, okay? No one wants people to die. Republicans don't hate poor people. I promise you. There's a reason why Republicans give so much in charity in general

compared to their liberal friends. There's a reason why it is typically Christians and conservative religious people that are running charities and organizations that actually directly help the marginalized and the poor and those who don't have health care coverage, it's simply a difference in what we believe the best methods are to care for the people that cannot care for themselves or who cannot afford to care for themselves. So we need to just establish that from the front because you hear a lot of people say, you know, who are supporters of Bernie Sanders, say, well, Republicans just hate poor people. They just want poor people to die. Oh, you're not pro life. You're just pro birth. Why? Because you don't believe in medical.

care for all. Well, that's silly. And we're going to talk about why that's silly. But of course, it's a lot easier to talk in talking points than to actually say what's true. But to you, any liberal friend that in the off chance, you are listening to this, we do not want people to die. No one does. No one does. Well, maybe some random people do. But as a rule, no one does. Okay? So it's just a different methodology. And we're going to talk about why that difference is. So first to the basics, what is the U.S. health care system? It's a little bit complicated. because we are different than that of most developed countries in that it's not a nationally paid health service.

It's not a single payer health service. It's not a multi-payer health fund. The U.S. health system can be described as a hybrid system. So this means that it is somewhat of a complicated network of multiple payers involving private and government health insurance options. In 2014, 48% of U.S. health care spending came from private funds, 28% came from households and 20% coming or came from private businesses. The federal government accounted for 28% of spending while state and local governments accounted for 17%.

For a large majority of Americans, their employers actually pay for their health care to private insurance companies that cover their medical expenses after a certain deductible is met. until then the medical expenses, some of the medical expenses are paid out of pocket by the person who is being insured, also known as the policyholder. Now, a deductible, let me just explain what that is in case you don't know. If you don't know, there's no shame in that. It's the amount of money paid out of pocket by the policyholder. That's you, the person who is insured before an insurance provider will pay any expenses. The higher your deductible, the more you have to pay out of pocket before your insurance actually kicks in. And so if you have a $500 deductible,

you will pay $500 out of pocket for your medical services or until your insurance company will start pitching in. That's not $500 for one medical service that is over time. And so you will have to reach $500 out of pocket before the insurance company will actually start pitching in and helping you take care of those services. After that, you pay something called a co-pay, which is a fixed.

fee that you pay from then on. So some more vocab, in case you don't know, a premium is how much you pay for your insurance. It depends on the policy you get, which can depend on your age, you can depend on your health history, et cetera. So when you buy your insurance policy, that's the kind of insurance that you get from a particular insurance company will outline under what terms and in what situations insurance will help you pay. It will tell you how much your premium is, how much your deductible is. Of course, there are all kinds of kinds of insurance besides medical insurance, but in this particular episode, that's what we are talking about. Since health care can be really expensive, depending on how sick you are and the

services you need, insurance becomes very important. It becomes necessary. Hence the debate we are having and have had for a long time over how those who cannot afford insurance, those who maybe don't have jobs are covered or don't have jobs that provide them insurance are covered. America, this is a talking about you hear a lot from the left. America is the only developed country without universal health care. This is how the World Health Organization describes this term universal health care. It means all people in communities can use the promotive, preventative, curative, rehabilitative, and palliative health services they need of sufficient quality

to be effective while also ensuring that the use of these services does not expose the user to financial hardship. Well, there's just a lot of interesting caveat. You can see where the World Health Organization is coming from. There's a lot of interesting caveats in there that is not necessarily describe universal health care. Maybe in a perfect world, but the whole quality and effectiveness and no financial hardship, we'll get into that. We do have government-run insurance companies. have government-run health care coverage. We have Medicare, Medicaid, Children's Health Insurance Program or CHIP, and we do have the VA. One-third of Americans are covered by Medicare, Medicaid, or CHIP. Medicare is a federal program that provides health care coverage

if you are 65 or above or under 65, and you have a disability no matter what your income is. Medicaid is a state and federal program that provides health coverage if you have a low income. If you're eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid, duly eligible, you can have both. You can apply for both and possibly be granted both. They can work together to give you health care coverage and lower your cost. CHIP is regulated by the federal government, but it's administered at the state level, so eligible children from families at about between 200% and 300% the federal poverty level. So that is about $44,000 to $67. $1,000 for a family of four.

Under certain circumstances, pregnant women can also be eligible for a chip coverage in some states. Now, there are still people who are uninsured. We have these programs, but there are still people who are uninsured. Maybe they don't get coverage through their employer. They couldn't qualify, though, for Medicare or Medicaid, especially if you are a young adult who is in a state that didn't expand Medicaid. Maybe they didn't apply at all.

So there are people who are uninsured. there are people who are what you might call or what you might hear called underinsured, which is why a huge reason why Obama enacted the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, back in 2010. The purpose of this legislation was to make it more affordable to purchase health insurance. They also wanted to lower the cost of health care, reduce the growing cost of Medicare and Medicaid throughout the United States. That's what they said they wanted to do. It promised to do this by offering consumers discounts.

These were known as or are known as tax credits on government-sponsored health insurance plans. They wanted to expand Medicaid assistance. The Medicaid assistance program to include more people who don't have it in their budgets to pay for health care. The Affordable Care Act changed some of the rules. Insurance companies had to follow. So in the past, if you had a pre-existing medical condition, you could be turned down by an insurance company for coverage or your cost of coverage could be really. high, but under the Affordable Care Act, you no longer could be turned down or charged more for pre-existing conditions. So under ACA, under Obamacare, you only receive discounts to help

to help offset health insurance costs if your household income is between one and four times the federal poverty level, which is a number the government uses to determine the minimum amount of money needed for food, needed for shelter, other basic needs. You can, you can choose to apply these credits to your premiums to lower your monthly insurance bill or you can wait until the end of the year and you can put them, you can declare them on your tax return. So Americans who meet certain income-based criteria have to by law under the Affordable Care Act have insurance. They have to have Medicare or Medicaid or they have to pay a penalty if they don't. That will be levied when you file your tax return. So this requirement is commonly referred to as the law's

individual mandate, which was very and is, well, I guess it's not really anymore, and we'll get to why, but it was extremely controversial. It was the most controversial part, I would say, of the Affordable Care Act. Democrats said that they included this individual mandate, this mandate that says you will pay a penalty if you don't have insurance because they figured that it would force young and healthy people to enroll in the health care exchanges, something they said would offset the higher cost of covering people with chronic diseases. They also assumed that people would take care of themselves better, which would theoretically reduce future health care expenses. That's what they said. But Republicans were extremely opposed to this. They believe that the penalties would be an unneeded burden on

families who maybe weren't covered by private insurance but didn't want or couldn't afford Obamacare, but now had to buy the coverage or else they'd get penalized. So they saw this as both counterproductive. They saw this as tyrannical. It's one thing, they would say, I think, to expand Medicaid so that more people are covered. It's another thing to force people who didn't have insurance to buy a government plan that they don't want. They were afraid that this would harm low-income families the most, and they were actually right about that. So, Republicans were correct. According to the IRS, more than half the total penalty payments were by people who had, who were earning less, sorry, got mixed up for a second, who were earning

less than $50,000 a year, 86% was from people earning less than $100,000 a year. So that is why, if you remember, you might not remember, depending on how old you are, in 2013, Ted Cruz and a few other conservatives, it was mostly Ted Cruz, put up a fight that ended in a government shutdown to try to fund Obamacare. It was unsuccessful. Ted Cruz took a lot of flack from both the right and the left for that, but it also is what kind of launched him onto the political scene. So he maybe saw that as a win in some ways. Then in 2017, a Republican-controlled Congress eliminated the mandate, which went into effect this year. So we don't know the results of that quite yet. The Democrats, of course, were upset by this because of how many people wouldn't be insured. And yes, that is true that some people wouldn't be insured, because, the mandate is no longer valid, but that's just because now they have a choice of whether or not to be insured. They're not kicked off. They just are not being forced to use to be on Obamacare anymore. So advocates of Obamacare would say that it slowed the rise of health care costs

and that it did this through providing insurance for millions and made preventative care free. It's good because they would say that it requires insurance plans to cover essential health benefits, including mental health, addiction, chronic diseases. They said that one good thing was that insurance companies couldn't deny people or raise costs for pre-existing conditions, but those who are against it are going to cite the harm that it did if you talk to any of them, that three to five million people lost their employment-based health insurance because a lot of businesses found it more cost-effective to pay the penalty and let their employees purchase insurance plans on the exchanges themselves.

other small businesses found that they can get better plans through the state run exchanges. So a lot of people lost plans that they really liked. They lost the quality coverage that they actually preferred. And so this is where that big lie that I am sure you've heard was uncovered that Obama kept on saying, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Obama repeated that over and over again. Then in 2013, he said, well, that's not really what I said. that said, no, we were just being misunderstood all along, but he did. It was a promise that Republicans

knew that he could not keep with this plan. Politifact explains it like this. The Affordable Care Act tried to allow existing health plans to continue under a complicated process called grandfathering, which basically said insurance companies could keep selling plans if they followed certain rules. The problem for insurers was that the Obamacare rules were strict. If the plans deviated even a little, they would lose their grandfathered status. practice, that meant insurers canceled plans that didn't meet new standards. Obamacare required services that a lot of people are required coverage that a lot of people don't need, like maternity care. That meant if someone had an insurance plan that didn't cover

maternity care, that plan had to be canceled, which really was bad for a lot of people. So if you're a 60-year-old guy, you don't need a plan that covers maternity care or pediatric care, because why would you? Your plan got canceled. if you were that guy. This happened to millions of people. And replacing the affordable plan that you liked in favor of another plan cost a lot of money. Obama and his team lied about this over and over again, saying that there's nothing in the plan that pushes people off their health care coverage.

That was demonstrably not true. That was a lie. And Obama actually did somewhat apologize later in 2013. He was in an interview with Chuck Todd. And he said, okay, that wasn't in. accurate. Maybe I exaggerated. Well, yeah, that's a big lie to tell, I would say. And also, I just want to note that you hear Obama, you hear Biden, you hear media pundits saying that Obama had a scandal-free presidency, that there were no bumps in the road, that there's nothing that happened that was

scandalous. Well, you might think that because of the media coverage of his presidency, both then and now. But the fact of the matter is, this was a big deal then. The fact that he said if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. And then he admitted that he was lying about that. Of course, he said he exaggerated it, but that's a lie. And maybe props to him for actually owning up to that. I mean, there's something to be said for that. But that's a big lie that affected a lot of people's lives. And really, I would say, manipulated a lot of people into believing that this would be a good thing. And they ended up on the wrong side of it. And so there have been scandals, of course, in the Obama presidency, Benghazi, Fast and Furious, IRS. That's a different

episode for a different day. But the fact of the matter is, this was a big lie that affected people in a really negative way. There were a lot of people that were upset about this in 2013. A Pew Research poll found that the number of people who saw Obama as untrustworthy actually rose by 15 points in 2013. And that just proves exactly what we said, that people were paying attention and that they were mad. They didn't want to be, they didn't want to be lied to. Because here's the thing. People don't like their health care coverage mess with if they like it. They don't want to mess with. A lot of people do. A lot of people are satisfied with the coverage that they get, at least for the most part, at least not enough to hand it over to the federal government. And then there was also

the controversial contraceptive mandate, which required insurance companies and employers who provided health insurance to cover the cost of birth control. There are a lot of religious organizations who are opposed to birth control from a religious and moral standpoint. So forcing them to pay for it would be an infringement on religious liberty. The contraception mandate wasn't actually in Obamacare legislation originally, but it came later in 2011 through regulations. And there were only narrow exemptions for this for churches, but did not include religious

nonprofits or religious corporations. and then in 2014, there was a Supreme Court case involving Hobby Lobby. You might know a little bit about that, which is a corporation that is owned by Christians, and the court ruled that closely held religious for-profit corporations did not have to provide birth control in their insurance plans for their employees. The Catholic Organization, Little Sisters of the Poor endured years of court battles until May 2016, the Supreme Court actually ruled in their favor and instructed the lower courts that had ruled against them to provide the government with an opportunity to find a way to provide services

for the women who want birth control without involving the little sisters. So really everyone won. But of course, the left is not necessarily happy with that because they don't believe that religious liberty should trump what they think is a right, birth control. So this is from becketlaw.org. In May 2017, President Trump issued an executive order directing HHS and other federal agencies to protect the Little Sisters of the Poor and other religious nonprofits from the mandate. On October 6, 2017, the government issued a new role with a broader religious exemption. In June 2018, the Little Sisters original case was finally resolved with an order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit on November 7th, 2018, HHS issued a rule finalizing the Little Sisters religious exemption. So that means that now, at least for now, I mean, this can always be, there can always be pushed back to this. There's always going to be people who are saying no religious liberty is not a worthy exemption. It's not a worthy reason not to provide your employees with health insurance. But for now, religious liberty did win a particular battle.

But this is also part of the reason why Christians really didn't like evangelical Christians really didn't like Obama because they felt targeted. by his policies. They felt, again, that Christianity, that religious views were being mocked in some way, and religious liberty was secondary to their agenda, particularly when it came to something like birth control. And so there was a lot of controversy over that. There's many moral and policy reasons why people did not like Obamacare. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation on December 14th, 2018, a federal district court, judge in Texas issued a ruling challenge. You probably remember this, not that long ago, issued a ruling challenging the future of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

The judge cited with Republican state attorneys general and ruled that since the 2017 tax bill passed by Congress zeroed out the penalty for not having health insurance. That's an individual mandate. The ACA is invalid. Democrat attorneys general have already taken actions to appeal the judge's ruling in the case and due to the government shutdown. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has paused the case. So that was back a few months ago. This is from the Kaiser Family Foundation. So the question is, why does all of this matter now?

The controversy of Obamacare, the fact that we even had Obamacare. The reason is because Obamacare was the primer for our current conversation about health care. It operated on the premise that health care is a right and therefore everyone must be covered or else. And it was the or else and is the or else that conservatives did not and do not like because it ended up being that everyone must be covered how the federal government wants you to be covered or else you will lose your plan and you will be fined by the government if you do not get Obamacare after losing that plan. Now like I said in 2017, Republicans repealed the mandate so people would no longer no longer be fined who didn't sign up for Obamacare.

But it's still all hangs in the balances. we're talking about Medicare for all. And this is causing a lot of contention. So that is why you hear Democrats say Republicans don't want you to have health care coverage, that they don't care about poor people, that they don't care about people being taken care of because we didn't like Obamacare and we don't like the idea of Medicare for all. And we'll get into why in a little bit. But it's true that Republicans don't want you to be forced to have coverage that you don't want.

Republicans don't want you to be fun. Republicans don't think that forcing higher taxes to pay for Obamacare, pay for Medicare for all, whatever it is, is a good idea. Republicans don't think that the federal government needs to be involved in health care in this way. Republicans don't want the federal government to infringe on religious liberty in this way. So it's not so black and white as saying Republicans don't want poor people to be covered. That's not true. We do not like this methodology. Or I should just say this method.

And yet this is what Democrats are now running on, especially Bernie Sanders. running for not just health care for all, which could be a mixture of private and public options, but Medicare for all. So everyone is on the same insurance, meaning we are all on Medicare. There is no choice. You get no private health insurance, no matter who your employer is. We are all on government-funded health care, no matter what. This would, the pro is, it would indeed guarantee that everyone had some kind of health care coverage. But it would also significantly lower the quality of care for everyone involved, and we will explain why. Democrats say this is going to lower the cost of medicine. It's going to lower the cost of basic care.

This is obviously going to eliminate premiums. It's going to eliminate deductibles because it's going to be funded by the government, which, as you know, means it is funded by you and me. It is funded by taxpayers. It is not free for anyone unless you are a part of the low tax bracket that essentially doesn't pay anything in taxes. then you are getting something for absolutely nothing and everyone else is paying it for you. But for the rest of us, we are paying for it. Kamala Harris, a presidential candidate, jumped on board with this idea a few months ago, saying at a CNN town hall. The idea is that everyone gets access to medical care. And you don't have to go to the process of going through an insurance company,

having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that that might require. Let's eliminate all of that. Let's move on, she said. sounds good. I mean, I hate paperwork. And so maybe that sounds good to you, too. But let's think about that for a second. Going through the government, going through government bureaucrats for things is always so efficient and helpful, right? Like, think about your last trip to the DMV when you had to report for jury duty, when you have to do anything that involves

the government, especially the federal government. The process is terrible. No, it's not efficient. It's not effective. Why? Because there's no motivation for most government. for, I won't say most, a lot, not all, maybe not most for a lot of government employees to be efficient and effective. There are hoops to jump through and the government does not care whether or not you're happy with their service because they know you have to use it. You got one place to go. There's no competition. It's not like an insurance company or another company who cares about keeping or losing their customers and therefore making them happy. The government does not care about that. Now, Kamala Harris backtracked later because guess, guess what?

what? This means that you are getting rid of the insurance industry entirely, which makes up 18% of our nation's economy. And it obviously means kicking people off the health care plans they like. And so that wasn't really well received. And so she had to kind of backpedal and say, okay, maybe I didn't mean all of that. There's also the problem. This is the big problem of how hospitals are going to stay in business. The reason is because hospitals get paid significantly less by Medicare than they do by private insurance. This is, according to the New York Times, for a patient's knee replacement, Medicare will pay a hospital $17,000. The same hospital can get more than twice as much or about $37,000 for the same surgery on a patient with private insurance.

That's because Medicare pays hospitals about 87 cents for every dollar of their cost compared with private insurers that pay $1.45. So smaller rural hospitals, healthcare centers, would probably have to shut down in a Medicare for all system because they couldn't afford to provide the same services. Or you're going to see hospitals laying off droves of employees in order to just stay afloat and to be able to pay for these services and to pay for the treatments that people have to get. That's the problem. That's the problem with Medicare for all, that it cuts revenue for these places so, drastically, which means a few things. Hospitals will have to close down or they'll just have to

fire employees or or and really they will have to lower their quality of care. Now, proponents of Medicare for all say no, no, no, that's not true. Hospitals can just cut costs and cut profits without doing any of those things. It'll just take a little bit of sacrifice. It'll be totally fine. But these are the same people who it shouldn't surprise us, really don't have a basic understanding of economics. These are the same people who believe that employers of small businesses are just going to raise the minimum wage of their employees and take a huge cut of their own profits without firing employees or automating employee tasks entirely. And it might be true in some cases that hospitals are charging too much. That's not going to solve the problem of the many, the vast

majority of, I would say hospitals that simply will not be able to afford the function in a Medicare for all system. The New York Times also says, says this. Those in favor of the most far-reaching changes, including Senator Bernie Sanders, who unveiled his latest Medicare for All plan as part of his presidential campaign, have remained largely silent on the question of how the nation's 5,300 hospitals would be paid for patient care. If they were paid more than Medicare rates, the final price tag for the program could balloon from the already stratospheric estimate of upward of $30 trillion over a decade. So what that last part means is if hospitals are paid more than they currently are now under Medicare, that's

going to cost us taxpayers more. This is already going to cost us about $30 trillion over a decade. And if Medicare pays hospitals more than they do right now, so more than 87 cents for the cost of the actual procedure, then that's going to cost us a lot more than that. Just another reminder, just another reminder, nothing is free. Nothing. is free. Healthcare will never be free. It cannot be free. College cannot be free. Taxpayers are paying a lot of money for these so-called free services that many on the left offer, and they're not quality. The profit margins on Medicare for hospitals is incredibly thin. As I've already said, a lot of hospitals you lose money accepting Medicare patients. So imagine if the entire system was Medicare. Again,

you've got to cut staffers to stay afloat, which creates a significant. limitations on care that you can offer to patients. There's a reason why in the UK and in Canada, which both have universal health care, people have to wait so long for major surgeries. In a lot of cases, there just aren't enough physicians to go around because, as we've already established, hospitals can't afford to pay their physicians because they're not getting enough money from government-run programs. Fraser Institute found that Canada has some of the worst wait times for emergency rooms, for basic sick care for elective surgeries. In fact, in 2016, Canadians waited an average of five months for medically necessary

specialist treatments. That's probably why 60,000 Canadians visit the United States and other countries for medical care each year. In the UK, they've had 70 years, 70 years to figure out how to run a government-controlled health care system, and yet 80% of doctors in the UK. say that they are understaffed. That probably explains, again, why over 50,000 non-urgent surgeries were canceled in 2018 when their systems in the UK, when their system was overwhelmed by flu season.

So that is what, I would say, that's what Bernie Sanders is hoping will happen over here. Not that people, I don't think that he wants people to die. I don't think he wants people to not be taken care of. But that's the kind of system that he wants, and that's the inevitable consequences of the system that he wants. According to Heritage by 2030, Americans already, as of right now, face a serious and potentially dangerous physician shortage, ranging between 15,800 and 49,300 primary care doctors and between 33,800 and 72,700 non-primary care doctors, accelerated retirement,

job-based burnout, growing demoralization, fuel that shortfall. So Medicare for All is only going to make all of that worse for the reasons that we just listed. we will have low quality care. Why? Because our hospitals and doctors offices will be understaffed. Why? Because Medicare pays less for services than private health insurance does, which means the profit margin on these services decreases significantly when Medicare is accepted and when profit goes down. And when profit goes down, cuts are made to be able to keep a business afloat. And when you make those cuts in a medical center, You've got fewer doctors, but you've got even more patients because you are required to serve everyone because everyone is under the same insurance plan.

So you've got overworked doctors at understaffed centers who are just not able to offer prompt or quality care due to the burden of work that they have. That is Medicare for all. So just understand that even though this sounds great, even though this sounds like a compassionate proposal, it is not. It is an expensive, inefficient, an effective proposal offered by someone, Bernie Sanders, who has accomplished exactly nothing in his political career, who has never once demonstrated even a basic understanding of economics, who was and probably still is a fan of the Soviet Union and Venezuela.

That is not an exaggeration, by the way, he has expressed deep-founded admiration for both of those tyrannical regimes, who is a socialist, who demonizes the 1%, who himself is a part of the 1%, because he is worth over a million dollars and even owns three homes. And he donates how much to charity did we learn from his tax returns? I think one percent of his salary to charity. And so I'm just not really buying the whole thing that he's doing everything he can for the least of these. But that's what socialists and those who advocate for socialism do. They opt, maybe with good intentions, many of them. They opt for lazy forms of so-called compassion, which is the government taking care of people. So they don't actually have to put any word.

or effort into helping people themselves. As I always say, socialism helps people feel virtuous without ever having to get off the couch. But the question is, so the question is, that's not the answer. So what is the answer? Do conservatives have a better plan than Bernie Sanders? There is something called the health care choice proposal that was presented by conservatives, patients would be able to choose the coverage arrangement that works best for them from a wide array of options. This includes direct primary care, short-term limited duration plans, catastrophic

coverage, or what they call gold-plated Cadillac coverage. Proponents say that this would make coverage far more affordable, lowering premiums by up to 32 percent, according to the Center for Health and Economy. Moreover, it would ensure that everyone would access a quality private coverage arrangement of their choice. So everyone who gets a government subsidy for health care would now get to control now have control over those dollars, they would be able to apply them to a plan that they choose rather than one that the government chooses for them. It would also do a way with Obamacare subsidy structure in which insurance companies receive taxpayer subsidies, dollar for dollars, they raise prices. So with this, federal funds would be placed on a budget and sent to states

to help people access a quality private coverage arrangement of their choice, including the poor and the sick. A Heritage Foundation study found that, when states have been given even a little bit of freedom from Obamacare's mandates, they have been able to lower projected 2019 premium. So we'll see about that in one state up to 43% while still ensuring that the sick retain access to care. There are 90 leading conservatives that have already endorsed the health care choice proposal as the path forward to a kind of a new solution rather than Medicare for all.

Now, Democrats will tell you, though, that Medicare for all is extremely popular. So Republicans just need to stop talking and to just give in. AOC actually tweeted this not too long ago that it's insanely popular. And they're somewhat right. There is a Kaiser Family Foundation that found that 71% of Americans are for Medicare for all. When you tell them that this will mean that health care will be guaranteed for everyone, they think, great, I want health care guaranteed for everyone, 71% of Americans.

but when you apply that or when you explain that, this means everyone will be on a single plan and this would eliminate insurance companies. Those who approve drop to 37%. When you explain this will lead to some delays in certain medical treatments. Those who approve drops to 26%. So basically, Medicare for All sounds great and is approved up by a lot of people until they learn how it works and what the repercussions will be. That is the truth for almost all democratic policies, by the way.

They all sound great. They all sound compassionate and free and righteous and good until you weigh the cost, until you look at the effects and the consequences and the limits on freedom and quality. But again, as we learned in our social justice episode, when it comes to equality of outcomes, the left rarely weighs the cost on the other side. And when it comes to Medicare for all, the cost is really high. So I hope that helped explain some of this for you. There's a lot more that we could get into as always,

but I hope that this gave you kind of a good understanding when you're watching these presidential debates coming up about what the heck they're talking about and what the truth is behind this a grandiose plan of Medicare for all. The fact of the matter is it's not something that we want to be a part of. So I hope that you guys have a great day and I will see you soon.