04/05/2017
Rather than immediately focusing on trade and immigration, Donald Trump acted like a typical Republican and plunged into health care. Luckily, he failed to pass the American Health Care Act which Paul Ryan slapped together and which would have heavily cost the Republican Congress in the mid-term elections. Unfortunately, it looks like they are trying to make another go of it.Aside from some promising signs on immigration, President Trump is governing like a typical Republican. But the Trump Coalition is not the Republican voting base. What pushed him to victory were working class voters in Rust Belt states, not "true conservatives" who want tax cuts for billionaires and more wars in the Middle East. If the president wants to keep faith with his voters, he needs to take some bold stands.
Ann Coulter recently suggested simple changes to "legalize buying health insurance" and unleash market forces. It doesn’t look like the GOP is going to do that. Frankly, another possibility superior to the bureaucratic nightmare we have now is a single payer system. The nationalist government of Poland did just that and profited.
As VOX notes, an increasing number of people on the Alt Right are supporting single payer. But the main obstacle is the existing Republican Party.
[E]ven if Trump were to be persuaded by his followers and embrace single-payer, he’d face a tough task. He can’t form a new right-wing party and sweep the legislative elections; he has to change the policies of the existent Republican Party, which has spent decades fighting proposals for universal health care, and get a quorum of members in the House and Senate on his side. That’s much harder, and suggests that the Spencers, Buckleys, and Derbyshires of the world won’t get their wish on this anytime soon.Call it the Trumpist Trap. Donald Trump campaigned on making the GOP a Worker’s Party. But for all the screaming about him being a dictator, he’s stuck working with a Republican Congress mostly filled with Beltway Right goofballs who opposed him during the campaign. Thus, on foreign policy, he’s being sucked into George W. Bush’s third term with potential conflicts in Syria and North Korea. On taxes, he’s being drawn into an utterly unnecessary battle which does not affect his base. And on health care, he’s doing the usual Republican tactic of not abolishing an entitlement program, but suggesting cuts, which is the worst of both worlds.[Why the alt-right loves single payer health care, by Dylan Matthews, April 4, 2017]
VOX cited two VDARE.com writers, me and John Derbyshire, as supporters of single-payer. John recently stated on Radio Derb:
I’ve been arguing for years that the only rational healthcare system is one that’s socialized — universal provision at a decent level, financed from general taxation, with a free market in health insurance for anyone who wants more and can afford it.That sounds like a combination of Ann Coulter’s plan for health insurance with a public option for what she called the "welfare cases."
Maybe you, dear reader, agree with this idea. Maybe you don’t. But one thing is absolutely certain. Obamacare Lite is the worst possible choice, and it represents the same failed Beltway Right thinking that got us to this point.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.