Tax THIS!

Single-payer is so great, they couldn’t even make it work in Vermont, with a comparatively healthy population, and a healthy median income, too. Jazz Shaw explains why Governor Peter Shumlin has given up his dream of socializing medicine in the Green Mountain Worker’s Paradise State:

Far more of a problem was the fact that the project couldn’t be funded in a self-sustaining way without causing an all out revolt among the peasants. Individual taxpayers would have been subjected to a 9.5% “premium assessment” while businesses would have been paying an even larger tax hit. And all of the money wouldn’t have resulted in an actual single payer system anyway. Shumlin was going to have to exempt large companies with their own healthcare plans and people would have still been eligible for Medicare. The competing plans would have gutted the system which would have needed essentially 100% buy-in and contributions from every citizen to even have a chance of working.

But perhaps the most telling feature of this staggering failure was the fact that the plan could not work without a massive influx of federal dollars.

Vermont ran out of other people’s money — and mercifully quickly, too.