Those who have suffered through Obamacare, with its soaring premiums, longer waits for care and millions still left without insurance, should beware. Because Vice President Kamala Harris, if elected, has something equally bad in store for you.
Originally, Harris’ put forward a grab bag of “fixes” for Obamacare, which has now been in force for 14 years. Among her recent ideas, according to CNN, include “making permanent the enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies; broadening the $35 monthly cap on insulin and $2,000 annual limit on out-of-pocket costs to all Americans, not just Medicare enrollees; speeding up Medicare drug price negotiations; and working with states to cancel patients’ medical debt.”
All sounds kind of innocent, right? It isn’t. It’s all part of the slow-but-steady move toward Medicare for All, the plan to create nationalized health care in the U.S., and abolish private insurance. It would be a disaster.
Though Harris has verbally backed away from supporting Medicare for All, her most recent idea, unveiled this week, is a dangerous step in that direction:
“The Veep on Tuesday used a friendly interview on ‘The View’ to lay out her plan to require Medicare to cover long-term home care for all seniors who can’t live independently,” the Wall Street Journal opined. “She said the new benefit would help the ‘sandwich generation’ of Americans who take care of children and aging parents. She put no cost estimate on this new taxpayer obligation, but home care on average costs $288,000 a year, so you get the idea.”
“It’s just about helping an aging parent or person — you know — prepare a meal, put their sweater on,” Harris said on the campaign trail. In fact it’s the last piece in a cradle-to-grave Medicare for All system.
But claims made that her so-called Medicare at Home benefit will cost only $40 billion (a low-ball estimate from the liberal Brookings Institution) a year are a joke. We already spend some $130 billion a year on such care.
And someone has to pay for it. Don’t believe the inevitable rhetoric that it will be “the rich.” Or that by squeezing other parts of the Medicare budget, it “will pay for itself.” No, it will be you who pays, with soaring taxes, denial of coverage, fewer choices, and even worse health care.
Don’t just take our word for it.
“It is difficult to overstate the irresponsibility, corruption, and insanity of this proposal,” the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute’s Michael F. Cannon wrote, noting the unsustainable $2 trillion-a-year deficits caused by the Democrats’ criminally wasteful Inflation Reduction Act COVID spending binge.
“With one hand she proposes to increase Medicare long-term-care spending by $40 billion. With the other hand, she proposes to cut $40 billion of Medicare drug spending — all without denying benefits to anyone.”
The truth is, it will expand spending well beyond that meager $40 billion.
The ever-vigilant New York Post asked a number of budget experts and economists their opinions of Harris’ latest attempt to buy votes from Americans worried about caring for their aging parents. Her plan “will increase federal spending and that will create more inflationary pressures at a time when American families are seeing prices having already jumped over 20% since Biden took office,” said Richard Stern, head of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation.
And it won’t result in improved care.
Meanwhile, in his Cato blog post, Cannon noted: “The best estimates indicate that one-third of the $1 trillion Medicare spends annually delivers no benefit to enrollees. That’s more than $300 billion per year. Such staggering levels of waste have fueled the rapid expansion of other government health spending.”
Added to the current mountain of Medicare waste, fraud and abuse, and America will be in even more serious fiscal trouble.
Government has never had a larger role in health care than it does today. Yet, despite the passage of Obamacare, Medicare expansion and a host of other changes, a 2022 Gallup Poll showed that 53% of Americans felt their health care was just “only fair” or “poor” for the first time in two decades.
America, you deserve better. Kamala Harris’ Medicare expansion won’t improve anything. It will definitely make our current budget crisis much worse and move us inexorably towards the socialized health care that the Democrats have long preferred. It’s a disaster in the making, but you can stop it. We have an election on Nov. 5. Say no while you can.
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