Would more government control of heath care have protected us better against the Coronavirus?
Leading Democrats like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York say “yes.”
A recent poll showed that Americans disagree by nearly two to one. 38% of Americans believe that a socialized health care system like Britain or Canada has would have responded less well to COVID-19. Only 22% believe a government monopoly would have performed better than our present health care system.
Who is right?
This is an important question as Medicare-for-All would, according to conventional estimates, raise taxes by $29 Trillion to $35 Trillion over the next decade. How can we judge if this tax increase would be worthwhile?
We could start by looking at how those nations that have socialized health care have fared in the wake of COVID-19.
The pandemic has created a surge in health care demand that has tested every nation’s ability to meet the needs of their patients.
Even before the virus, other developed nations with government-run health care systems had understaffed hospitals and long waiting lines for even basic treatment.
In 2019, The United Kingdom had a shortage of 10,000 doctors and 43,000 nurses, with 9 in 10 managers in the National Health Service saying that too few doctors and nurses presented a danger to patients. At any one time, 4.5 million patients were waiting for hospitalization.
Closer to home, in Canada, the typical patient had to wait a record 21.2 weeks – or five months – to receive treatment from a specialist after being referred by their general practitioner in 2017.
Before the pandemic, the U.S. had 35 intensive care unit beds per 100,000 people – nearly three times the 12 beds Italy and five times the 7 ICU beds in the UK.
How did the USA avoid the virus overwhelming our ability to provide ventilators, hospital beds and care? Did we centralize control? Move towards Medicare-for-All?
No, the Trump Administration moved in the opposite direction by removing bureaucratic roadblocks and ending government monopolies.
The federal, state and local governments together abolished or suspended over 500 rules and regulations since the pandemic began. Less government red tape allowed hospitals, medical research centers, pharmaceutical companies and doctors and nurses to respond to the ever-changing challenge of the virus.
This deregulation has spurred medical innovation, allowing America to lead the way on the development and production of a Coronavirus vaccine.
Regulatory relief has also protected and expanded access to health care for American patients. Doctors were allowed to more easily move across state lines. Telemedicine was allowed to speed up health care while lowering costs.
If we had socialized health care, we would look more like Britain, Canada and Italy.
Adding insult to injury, Medicare-for-All would lead to significant middle-class tax increases at a time that the U.S. economy and American families and businesses across the country are struggling.
The Committee for A Responsible Federal Budget finds that “impossibly high taxes on high earners” would raise just one third of the total cost. The rest—some $20 Trillion would come from us.
Even Bernie Sanders admits that the middle class will take it on the chin to pay for Medicare-for-All. His plan includes a new, $3.9 trillion, 4 percent payroll tax on workers, as well as trillions of dollars in taxes on employer benefits and businesses. And it still falls trillions of dollars short of paying for the full cost of the program.
There is reason to suspect that Democrats are under-stating the taxes they plan to impose on middle income Americans. In 2007, candidate Obama promised that he would NEVER raise any taxes on any American earning less than $250,000.
What happened?
Obamacare imposed at least 7 taxes on the middle class. Getting anywhere close to the $30 trillion in new spending will require trillions of dollars in new taxes on middle class families and small businesses. That will cost most Americans more than the virus ever did. Every year.
To protect us against the next virus we need to say “no” to the single payer system that has failed in Europe.
In the short term, lawmakers must protect against efforts to incrementally move the U.S. health care system toward more government control. This means opposing proposals that impose price controls on medicines including efforts to adopt foreign price controls. It also means rejecting plans to impose price fixing on the health care system as a “solution” to surprise medical billing.
Lawmakers must also prevent COVID-19 from forcing an expansion of government health care. Almost 40 million Americans have recently lost their jobs, and with it their employer provided health care. Congress should step in and offer a bridge for these workers to retain their employer health care so they are not forced onto Obamacare or Medicaid, an outcome that would strengthen the effort of socialists to expand the federal government’s role in health care.
The Coronavirus pandemic has not changed the fact that socialized health care is a bad idea. It would harm medical care and lead to trillions in higher taxes for American families.
The lesson from the pandemic should be that the costs and failures of government control of health care—higher taxes, more spending, wage and price controls and innovation killing regulations—are clearer to all Americans.
Such lessons are most expensive if we fail to learn from them.
Grover Norquist is President of Americans for Tax Reform
