Bernie Sanders has been getting a lot of heat from the media lately, as there appears to be a desperate, coordinated attack on socialist Senator, who appears to have some momentum weeks before the Iowa caucuses. The New York Times editorial board recently hit him for his past anti-immigration positions. Such a position is heresy in today’s Democratic Party.
Bernie prides himself for his many years of being “right” on the issues, be it the war in Iraq, education, taxes, or healthcare.
But has he always been a supporter of the leftist position on healthcare? His position now is that if every major country on earth can guarantee health care to all and reduce costs then America can, too. Ignoring the falsehoods in that argument for now, Bernie supporters might be shocked to know that Comrade Bernie didn’t always think this way.
In fact, back in 1987, Bernie argued that government-run healthcare would bankrupt our country. “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.”
Here’s video of Bernie making this statement.
That’s what he said about Medicaid. Medicare as a program provides far more benefits and is what Bernie is seeking to expand to everybody now.
And it’s not like Bernie hasn’t been called out on this before either. In 2017, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked Bernie about his past position when Sanders was a guest a Meet The Press. He couldn’t give a decent answer and dodged the questions.
The reason Bernie dodged the questions is that he knows that once people know how the system works, and see the actual results of similar programs in other countries, where wait times for specialists and even basic care are absurdly long, and general access to care is greatly reduced compared to the United States.
The Wall Street Journal recently noted that Sanders’ plan would inevitably require price controls and rationing, which would result in lower-quality health care and poorer health outcomes “Such government rationing and price controls on drugs are one major reason that countries with socialized medicine […] have lower cancer survival rates than the U.S. The age-adjusted cancer mortality rate is about 20% higher in the U.K and 10% higher in Canada and France than in the U.S.”
So why is Bernie Sanders advocating for a system that would reduce the quality of care, increase mortality, and, as, as he himself acknowledged, would bankrupt the country?
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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