FLASHBACK: Bernie Sanders Says Medicaid-For-All Would Bankrupt America
Thursday September 14 2017
Ah, 1987. Bon Jovi saw a million faces and rocked them all with Slippery When Wet. A young Rick Moranis made us laugh in Spaceballs. And Bernie Sanders said that a medicaid-for-all type plan would…wait, would bankrupt the country?
That’s right. While Bernie Sanders has Democrats signing a suicide pact by supporting single payer health care (see Elizabeth Warren Tag Teams Bernie Sanders in Senile Healthcare Bill and California Senate Flips Bird to Taxpayers. Passes Single-Payer Healthcare Bill), he apparently had a better grasp of math in the 80s.
WhenTalk about bad medicine.
Sanders was mayor of Burlington, he filmed a show called “Bernie Speaks
with the Community.” During one 1987 episode about the American health
care system, he said that giving everyone Medicaid for all would be too
much of a financial burden for the United States to bear.
“One of
the points that we understand and I think was reinforced when we went to
Canada,” Sanders told Dr. Miltion Terris, “Number one, you want to
guarantee that all people have access to healthcare as you do in
Canada.”
Sanders continued, doubting that America’s system could handle such a change.
“But
I think what we understand is that unless we change the funding system
and the control mechanism in this country to do that,” he said. “For
example, if we expanded Medicaid [to] everybody. Give everybody a
Medicaid card – we would be spending such an astronomical sum of money
that, you know, we would bankrupt the nation.”
(You knew the jokes you were getting before you clicked this)
To
be fair though, he was talking about “Medicaid” for all when what he’s
pushing now is “Medicare” for all, so that’s like comparing apples to…a
different kind of apple. Wait no, apples are delicious. It’s more like
comparing dog poop to cat poop. Different? Yes. But still poop.
If
anything, I guess America’s budget is greater now than 30+ years ago.
But so also is our debt. So I dunno, maybe people should pay for their
own selves and government can stay the hell out. These are just ideas,
obviously. Wouldn’t want government to get carried away and allow
Americans to mind their own beeswax. How scandalous.
Apparently Bernie understood economics before he completely forgot about economics.
