The Washington Post shocked many of its Democratic readers this week by telling the truth about the growing disaster in the UK’s National Health Service — a cautionary tale as a few Republicans joined Democrats to extend the failed Obamacare subsidies rather than reform our own broken health care system.
Socialism is in vogue in America. Various socialists are assuming greater power in the Democratic Party and mayors such as Zohran Mamdani (New York) and Katie Wilson (Seattle) are taking over the leadership of major cities.
I discuss the rising class of American socialists in my new book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. The young voters fueling this shift have never experienced life under socialism and have no memories of the meltdowns in prior such systems. As former socialist and communist countries move toward capitalism, many Americans are embracing socialism, according to polls.
The Washington Post editorial board exposed the myth of nationalized systems in its scathing column on the UK’s National Health Service, which is asking sick people to stay away from hospitals as the system struggles to offer basic care.
The NHS has existed for years in a perpetual state of emergency. This was the case before the pandemic hit, and it has only gotten worse. Hospital corridors overflow and routine procedures get canceled due to a catastrophic event commonly known as “winter.” It comes around every year, yet the system, despite annual funding increases, still somehow remains unable to cope.
A campaign to keep people away from hospitals during the holidays is underway, which includes begging the public to seek out other forms of treatment for “less serious” injuries and ailments. The British press compares the messaging to “Covid-era stay-at-home pleas,” which included asking patients who needed care to avoid medical facilities in order to “protect the NHS.”
In November, some 50,468 people waited 12 hours or more in emergency departments, often on trolleys in corridors. This is the highest on record for that time of year. Some 2.35 million people went to A&E in November, the highest on record for that month.
What is troubling in the debate over Obamacare is that some Democrats admit that it has failed. Democrats touted the law with an enabling class of academic experts as promising lower health care costs in a system that would pay for itself. Obama himself spread the false claim that you could keep your doctor under Obamacare. (later called the “lie of the year.”)
It proved to be a disaster. Health care costs soared under Obamacare and Democrats stepped in to pass massive subsidies that pay a fortune to insurance companies without doing anything to correct the underlying problems.
The shocking increase in costs under Obamacare should galvanize a nation in seeking a major overhaul without delay. Health care is now unaffordable for many. Yet, that desperation is political gold for many in dangling subsidies before voters as an inducement to return them to power.
With the midterm elections approaching, Congress is about to repeat the same pay-now-worry-later approach. For some, the directions may even be reassuring. As Obamacare craters, it will become increasingly difficult to return to a market-driven system. Instead, many Democratic members want a single national health care system or a Medicaid-like system for all.
It does not matter that the UK is struggling with its own system to provide basic care, and NBC is describing the UK system as “broken.”
With the threat of the Democrats taking over the House in the midterms and producing gridlock in Washington, it is unlikely that the GOP can remain firm and unified on creating an alternative. Some will join Democratic members admitting that Obamacare failed, but this is not the time to correct the problem. Instead, we will pour more money into a broken system and kick the can down the road.
Turley goes full fox shill here yet again, completely in line with his Roy cohn street rep…
Let’s venture into the realm of the factual though, shall we?
‘Obamacare’, the Affordable Care Act, was the R plan for Healthcare. It’s what Romney did, quite successfully in MA. It was originally built on a model that originated in west Germany and was taken up by both Nixon and Dole in their Healthcare plans but could never get through due to the stranglehold the insurance lobby has held over American politics. And it’s exactly why R’s never come up with a replacement plan in their non stop effort to torpedo what they labeled Obamacare from the moment obama’s administration got it passed…
Originally, Obama was aiming for full public option and actually had 60 votes for it if he could convince the ‘Blue dog’ caucus to go along. A real maybe since most of the blue dogs were as corrupt as all R’s were in taking insurance lobby money. Then Ted Kennedy died and was replaced by Scott Brown in MA and there went the 60 votes. So Obama adopted the Romney plan.
R’s have dedicated to taking it down since. First by R governors in refusing the medicaid expansion in their states. Then by systematically attacking the individual mandate. Now by attacking tax break extensions for those in the portal…giving increased tax cuts to the upper income brackets at each stage of their efforts to take out the ACA.
And the ACA did indeed lower Healthcare costs in states friendly to it. I paid one third what it would’ve costed for my first hip surgery under the ACA than it was going to cost pre ACA.
And probably most of you dumb f#$king magats only have your health insurance due to the ACA. Too bad you couldn’t have gotten replacement brains on your policy.
I lived in England….a friend came within hours of death for appendicitis misdiagnosis multiple times.
She only lived because her husband took her Private….she was dying in the hallway on a gurney…with no one doing anything.
Some things they did were great…but some terrible….took my toddler to a hospital for a bleeding head wound…was told it would be 4 hours till someone would look at them! Went to a private doctor. Many treatments require years of waiting. The USA system needs to return to a more customer paying system….billions are being wasted…on purpose!
What a lie. You are not a MD.
“The young voters fueling this shift have never experienced life under socialism and have no memories . . .” (JT)
Because we do not have a functional educational system (from k-college).
If we had one, those “young voters” would know about socialism’s greatest disasters, such as this:
In the 1930’s, socialist Russia collectivized private, individual farms in Ukraine. The result was the Great Famine — a socialist-made catastrophe that killed millions of Ukrainians.
US healthcare has been a mess for decades, Obama care just gave it a new set of problems. It, more or less, works for us, but the rest of the world seems to be in utter confusion as to why we don’t have European style nationalized healthcare. I suppose we can add that to the list of things that few non US residents understand, like free speech, gun rights, our legal system, etc. We expect healthcare on demand, without waiting, we expect to be able to choose our own doctors, and we expect it to be the best and to cost the least. We expect doctors to be held accountable for mistakes, we expect the newest technology and drugs available. We also don’t want to pay for anyone else’s healthcare. Doctors expect to be very highly paid, hospitals, insurance companies, and pharma expect to make big profits. If there isn’t an incentive, few people will want to enter the healthcare profession, pharma will have little interest in developing new drugs, and without profit, there is little incentive for insurance companies to take on risk. Not sure if there is a plan that will make everyone happy. Another thing to consider, there is really no other country in the world that takes in as many legal and illegal immigrants as the US. It is hard to see how any system could stay solvent and continue to roll out the health care red carpet to millions of new people each year, most of whom pay virtually nothing in taxes.
It’s the ambulance chasing lawyers, pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies. They are parasites sucking people in distress dry. It’s what they do.
Be careful what you ask for. Those who tout “Medicare for all” conveniently ignore the funding source for Medicare. Retirees currently on Medicare actually prepaid for this benefit: many of us have paid Medicare taxes for upwards of fifty years. As for “a Medicaid-like system for all,” we would then pay, in the form of increased taxes, for a system that limits both provider and care options, and does not cover many medications. In healthcare, as well as most other commodities, capitalism is superior to socialism. Folks are generally more careful about how they spend their own money than how the spend other people’s money. As Maggie Thatcher famously — and accurately — said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
You know the old saying, it’s a great system till you run out of someone else’s money.
“Health care costs soared under Obamacare . . .”
Which was easy to predict. The “free” always becomes prohibitively expensive. And then nonexistent.
Professor Turley. Yes, Socialism is in vogue, but they do understand it has never really worked. Those inclined to socialism are unabashed. They have two caveats at the ready. (1) This time we’ll do it better, or (2) This time we won’t make the same mistakes. What they miss is (A) Every socialist regime is top-heavy in power, and eventually becomes corrupt*, and (B) An endless number of mistakes can be made.
*Example. With the rogues gallery of appointments Mamdani has already made, we’ll call his mayoral debut as pre-corrupt.
World War II left Europe in ruins. Its infrastructure was destroyed, factories and hospitals were wiped out, roads and mass transit were a thing of the past, and, of course, millions of people were left injured, homeless, and harmed by the war. The Marshall Plan was a brilliant initiative proposed and carried out by George Marshall, U.S. Secretary of State. Part of the Plan paid for restoring hospitals and starting what today is known as the National Health Service in the U.K.
Some at home were advising President Truman to follow the British model and establish a national healthcare system run by the government. Truman balked, saying it would make him look like a socialist. Besides, he said, the U.S. suffered very little property damage, and its casualties from the war were almost all military, for which we had the Veterans Administration. In Europe, things were very different, and the government was the only functioning enterprise that could help restore healthcare. Truman increased VA appropriations but steadfastly opposed a national healthcare program for American civilians.
Today, Truman’s wisdom is seen in the U.S. healthcare system, which, despite the grumbling of left-wing discontents, remains the model of excellence Truman wanted. He knew that socialism was the path to lax service, poor care, and bad management. It would do well today for some to study Truman’s reasoning; it made sense then and makes sense now.
Not correct. Harry S. Truman did not specifically model his health care proposal on the British system, but he was influenced by the broader international movement toward national health insurance that included Britain. By the time Truman proposed a universal national health insurance program in November 1945, most major European countries, including Britain which enacted a similar program in 1911.
The UK health system is a disaster. It’s woefully underfunded. But let’s not judge socialized healthcare because one system sux. Let’s see what word and what doesn’t. Japan has avert successful healthcare system, even though the Japanese see their doctors 4x often as US people.
Let’s judge socialism because it never worked anywhere at anytime ever. You will see NYC, Seattle and other socialist hot spots suffer and fail and then you will say let’s try it over here, or over there or somewhere else and repeat, repeat repeat.
“Let’s judge socialism because it never worked anywhere at anytime ever”. What an absolutely stupid comment.
At best you’re a delusional 70 y/o, you never worked in healthcare, never studied healthcare economics, or the history of healthcare systems on the planet earth.
And you never were a lawyer, as you claim.
Yes, young people didn’t witness the failures of socialism and likely can’t point to a working system that reflects their policy ideas. You don’t need to have personal knowledge and experience if you have a functioning educational system, where students learn history and economics. The health care issue is a reflection on our schools.
Students learn fake history, slanted anti-American, anti-capitalist and anti-western ideologies that will continue to destroy us from within. This was the left’s plan, they implemented it and it is working to help them weaken us vis a vis a) the Soviets, but they failed and now vis a vis the CCP.
O-dumber care should be thrown in the trash can.
It was never affordable!
What a stupid comment. Expected form dustoff.
And yet you have health insurance, thanks to Obama.
Otherwise you would be begging on the streets of Seattle with your shopping cart in tow.
If you are not already.
It’s not affordable, you imbecile. That’s why premiums have gone up hundreds of percent and require subsidies.
Watched a video yesterday of a guy who paid $800 a month for insurance prior to Obamacare for his entire family with $3500 annual deductible. Now he pays over $2000 per month and his deductibles are $17,000. Meaning he effectively only hss “insurance” for catastrophic medical conditions – while he has depleted his entire savings.
On EVERY issue, you idiots live in a make believe fantasy world.
Why would you need to beg in Seattle? Isn’t everything going to be free there? What makes you say Dustoff has health care due to Obama?
I saw a piece about a couple that needed the subsidies because their premiums for health care were going from something like $10,000 a year to $30,000 a year. The only problem is that they were a couple that both retired in their 50s and therefore obviously very well off and living off of others subsidizing their care. This is like rent control where people like THE WEALTHY MAYOR OF NYC was living in subsidized housing while truly poor people are living in the Bronx.
“Instead, we will pour more money into a broken system and kick the can down the road.”
Same with education.
Not a political system in the world that isn’t infected with kickthecandowntheraod-ism.
Knowing you’re a really old fart, tell us about the good ole days before health insurance.
Called for a doctor’s appointment and got in within 24 to 48 hours. Took a wound to the ER for stitches and was out within a couple of hours. And medical help didn’t break the bank back in the day for us “Old Farts.” Just one of the reasons why we call them the good old days.
Ask us “old farts” about how life was back in the day before little brain washed idiots like you started taking over government positions like Mamdani et al. You may not believe it but life was better and morons like you couldn’t type awy in mommy’s basement with no wife, no job, no drivers license and no real education.