“If you think health care is expensive now, wait till you see how much it costs when it’s free!” said PJ O’Roarke, famously.
If there’s one thing government is horrible at it is estimating how much things will cost. I don’t recall a single incidence where the official estimates were well under what a program actually cost, though it has to have happened in the thousands of government programs that exist.
But healthcare is something they are especially awful at estimating. When Medicare was originally passed, the official government estimates of costs had the entire program costing $12 billion a year by 1990. It cost that much in 5 years, in 1990 the program cost about $100 billion. That’s quite a big miss, don’t you think?
That miss, however, did not give the federal government pause or even have them thinking about repeal, “reform” or really changing the program to cut costs at all. It was only 5 years old, it would have been fairly easy to do, or at least much easier. Yet, they did nothing – and by “they” I mean politicians.
What Abdul El-Sayed is promising is nothing new, Democrats have been pushing for one degree or another of socialized medicine for decades, and every little step they’ve taken – every time they’ve messed with the system to “improve” it has been designed for that very purpose.
Obamacare was not only destined to fail; it was designed to. The only problem Democrats had was it failed too soon – right from the start – allowing voters to notice their lies and associate the cost increases with the Democrats directly responsible for them. They also noticed the lack of being able to keep their plan and the doctor they liked, not to mention the fact that the $2,500 in premium savings didn’t materialize, it just went in the other direction.
