Keith Evans
2 min readJul 1, 2019

--

Bernie knows from long experience that Congress represents many interests and those don’t always include the people. He is used to reaching well beyond what he knows is attainable so room to compromise is available. President Obama never seemed to get that concept, but especially early in his administration when he tackled healthcare.

From a strictly economic perspective, it is not necessary to compromise on his ideal system at all. The argument using increased demand for services as a negative simply underscores the extent to which the people are being underserved. Very few patients would view a trip to the doctor as having any entertainment value. The monopoly issuer of the currency can afford anything that is available and priced in dollars without incurring inflation. Few sectors have as much built-in profit as healthcare so some inflation could be easily absorbed by providers, especially in the drug industry, and I’m sure Bernie would freeze prices until the program was deployed long enough to shake out any bugs.

While his plan is called Medicare for all, it would more closely resemble Medicaid in its inclusion of benefits and lack of patient payments required. With a long and successful track record of paying for over half of all medical billing, Medicare offers the positive impression that will be needed to sell the program to a nation very adverse to anything suggesting socialism. Any negatives associated with it are actually due to the added cost of administration that insurance forces on providers that Medicare doesn’t pay. Eliminating those costs is a large portion of the savings offered so the best approach is to make insurance go away totally for providers.

My only concern with Bernie’s approach is his pandering to the “pay for” mentality that currently prevents Americans from realizing many benefits from their government. While taxation of extreme wealth is necessary to prevent America from sliding into full fascism, linking that taxation to revenue for the government that neither needs nor uses revenue is not moving in the right direction in my opinion. It only promotes the combative war between capital and labor classes that has become the hallmark of political functions and so badly corrupted our government with neoliberalism.

--

--