Sally Pipes on the High Cost of Free Stuff
A government takeover of the US health care system has never looked more plausible.
Harry Truman once remarked, “Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists say ‘on the one hand…’, then ‘but on the other…’”
In several states, politicians seem to be guided as if by these elusive one-handed economists in drafting legislation for single-payer healthcare.
In 2017, California’s state senate managed to pass a bill (still pending) that would force all Californians into a single, state-run health care system, but the state senate’s Appropriations Committee estimated it would cost more than twice the total state budget.
We can’t entirely blame politicians, since a majority of Americans seem to think that single-payer or “Medicare for All” would save them money and ensure access to healthcare.
But as Michael Munger has noted, the middleman — whether the notorious price-gouger or more mundane insurance broker — performs a vital service in a competitive market. Unfortunately, the health care market becomes less competitive with each new government intervention, so it’s no surprise that Americans are tired of the current system.
It’s time for a reality check.
Sally Pipes is the President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute and author of several books dissecting the magical thinking that makes unworkable “Medicare for All” proposals so popular.
The False Promise of Single-Payer Health Care (2018) debunked the main claims made in favor of single payer. In January 2020, her latest book False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All will be released to coincide with what could be one of the most consequential elections in our history, as Democrats promise to remake a sector of the economy that constitutes 20% of total output.
Pipes joined me to review the unfounded claims made by demagogues like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, such as:
- Single-payer increases quality — By most measures, the U.S. far outranks Canada and the UK in quality of care, including wait times and rates of recovery from serious illness. There’s a reason Canadians come to the U.S. for procedures.
- Single payer saves money — “Between 2001 and 2016, spending by Canada’s provinces on health care shot up 116.4 percent. Costs are growing faster than the rest of the economy,” she writes.
In the book, we also learn that Medicare is the single biggest contributor to the national debt — around $400 billion per year.
As the Cato Institute’s Michael F. Cannon notes, “The Medicare program is a bonanza of centralized economic planning, special-interest lobbying, pricing errors, perverse incentives, low-quality care, improper payments, and fraud. To paraphrase Lenny Bruce, Medicare is so corrupt, it’s thrilling.”
This is the same program that Bernie Sanders wants to expand into the world’s largest and most generous health care system in the world.
Listen to my interview with Sally to learn the difference between Medicare for All and the “Public Option,” and why we must stay on guard against so-called moderate proposals that are designed to give way to fully socialized medicine.
Transcript:
Bob Zadek: Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show. This morning we will be discussing single-payer Medicare for free. Everything free. That is going to be one of the major battlegrounds of the 2020 election. Whenever any candidate or any politician offers something for free, we know that this is political speak for “very expensive.” The only difference between real “very expensive” and fake “very expensive” is that in “free,” somebody else pays.
It is free for you, but very expensive to society. Since we are talking about Medicare and free healthcare for everybody — gutting the healthcare insurance industry that 50 million Americans enjoy — it is important that as we follow the political debate that we understand what the politicians are offering us or what they are trying to avoid.
To help us understand the concepts of Medicare-for-All, free health care, free drugs, free everything, and eternal life, I’m happy to welcome back to the show Sally Pipes. Sally is the President and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute. It’s a San Francisco based think tank which does especially good work, and Sally is an expert in the area of healthcare.
As I like to do when there’s an issue that needs to be discussed, I try to find the most knowledgeable person I know of and have heard about, and that certainly describes Sally. So Sally is going to join us this morning and help us understand what’s going on and what’s being offered. Is it of any value? Is there any way we can get healthcare for all? And if, God forbid, one of the Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders or the others get elected, what is in store for life in America?
Sally, welcome to the show this morning.
Sally Pipes: Thank you so much for having me on again.
The Disastrous Democrats’ Scheme for Single Payer Healthcare
Bob Zadek: You have written extensively on healthcare. In 2018 you published The False Promise of Single Payer Healthcare, and you’re about to release False premise, False Promise, the Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All. Tell us what healthcare life would be like in America if the Democratic proposals for medicare were to succeed.
Sally Pipes: Well, do people have about five or six hours? There are so many. It’s such an amazing and enormous project that I like to say understanding health care is similar to unraveling an onion. There are many layers and many tearful moments.
Bob, the first thing is to describe single-payer Medicare for All as envisioned by Senator Bernie Sanders, Washington State house member Pramila Jayapal, Elizabeth Warren, and sometimes the Senator Kamala Harris from California. Single-payer means there is one payer for all of our healthcare, that payer being the government.
I like to say understanding health care is similar to unraveling an onion. There are many layers and many tearful moments.
Under Bernie Sanders’ and Pramila Jayapal’s plan, the government would be the provider of healthcare. The only other two groups that would be left would be the Veterans Administration and the Indian Health Services. Everything else would be rolled into one giant single-payer healthcare system with the government providing all healthcare.
This issue of course was always out there. I’m Canadian; I grew up under single-payer healthcare. Canada banned all private coverage for anything considered medically necessary. They have a single-payer system and we can talk about the long waits, the rationed care, and the tax costs later. But Bernie Sanders really brought the issue of single-payer to the forefront back in 2016 when he was running against Hillary Clinton to get the Democratic nomination.
Of course then in 2017, he released his single-payer bill, never ever saying how much it would cost or how it would be paid for. Then, in April of this year, he introduced his revised single-payer healthcare system. Just the other day he came out and said that his plan would probably cost between $30 and 40 trillion over 10 years and it would be paid for by tremendous new taxes as well as higher taxes on the existing taxes that we have.
Senator Warren is in Bernie’s camp and is pushing a single-payer system. Kamala Harris, in Des Moines, Iowa earlier this year, said she supports a single-payer system and wants to get rid of the insurance companies, but she has backtracked on that. And in the first debate, when the host asked who supported single-payer, she put her hand up along with Sanders, Warren, the New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and herself, and then later that night she said, “Well, I really didn’t understand the question.” I would say deep down she does support single-payer in the same way that all of the other candidates do.
They all either support single-payer like Bernie, or they support what I call a “stepping stone” approach to single-payer such as Joe Biden — something called a “public option,” where the government would provide its own insurance company that would compete in the insurance exchanges in the states with private carriers. Ultimately, all of these plans that are being talked about now would crowd out private coverage. Ultimately we would all be left in a single-payer Medicare for All system.
An Insight into Canada and Britain: “Ration Care” and Mediocrity
Bob Zadek: Now Sally right now, if I don’t feel right, I call my primary physician, they answer the phone, I make an appointment, I’m diagnosed and then I’m sent to a specialist. So on the very basic level, I call a physician that I have chosen, who I have decided is the best person for me.
Under single-payer, how would it work? How would you get healthcare? Who decides who treats you? These words are global words and are complicated and have lots of components, but let’s get down to life in America under a single-payer system. You can tell us from experience, because this is how it functions in the UK or Canada.
Sally Pipes: So, if Bernie Sanders somehow defeated Mr. Trump, he said that within four years he would transform the U.S. healthcare system into a single-payer system.
He would tell the American people that it would be free.
There would be no referrals to specialists. You would just call a specialist if you needed one.
There would be free dental, free drugs, and free long-term care. In Canada, the average wait from seeing a primary care doctor to getting treatment by a specialist is five months. You can’t call up a specialist.
You go to your general practitioner, what we call a primary care doctor here. That person decides if you’re going to see a specialist or not. That’s when you have to wait five months for getting your appointment and getting treated. Depending on who your primary care doctor is, they decide who you can see for a specialist.
If your primary care doctor doesn’t have great access to great specialists you won’t see whoever might be the best in the business for a variety of different sources. That’s a very important point. When Bernie says there will be no referrals, this is not possible, because people would be calling up specialists all the time and there aren’t enough specialists to deal with every single person that calls up and says they want to see their gastroenterologist or their neurosurgeon.
Also, if the government takes over the healthcare system as Bernie and the Democrats say they will, one of the ways they say they will cut costs is by paying providers like doctors and hospitals less. So under these plans, doctors would be paid medicare rates, which are about 40% below what they get paid for treating patients with private insurance.
There is no question that all doctors would be employees of the government, and a lot of doctors would retire early from medicine and go into another profession, particularly docs who are in their mid-fifties.
The second point is that the best and brightest young people who traditionally in this country have gone into medicine wouldn’t go into medicine because they know they wouldn’t be able to practice the kind of medicine that they would be trained for. The U.K. has the same situation with long waits and over 4 million Brits on waiting lists in the U.K. this month.
There is a shortage of doctors. In the U.K., they try to incentivize doctors abroad in foreign countries by giving them money to come to the U.K. and practice medicine. They had very few doctors who wanted to come and practice under Britain’s National Health Service. Britain is slightly different in that they, under The National Health Service Act, allow private coverage to run parallel. About 10 to 15% of Brits actually have private coverage and they use that when they find out under the National Health Service that the waiting time for them to get treated is too long.
Whereas in Canada, they didn’t include any private coverage under the under the Canada Health Act. So what happens is if you’re middle income or higher than middle income and you think it’s important that you get an MRI or you have a hip replacement, 220,000 Canadians go abroad. Either they come to the U.S. Or they go to another country to pay out of pocket for treatment. So, Canadians have an escape valve. If we get single-payer and the government is the sole provider, we will have the same problem, “ration care.”
You mentioned in the case of my mother who died of colon cancer. When she was a senior, she felt that she might have colon cancer. She went to her GP who had an x-ray done, which of course doesn’t show colon cancer. She was told she needed to get a colonoscopy and they said, “There are too many younger people on the waiting list for colonoscopies as it is.”
That was in July. Then, in November, she started hemorrhaging.
She went to the emergency room. She spent two days in the transit lounge waiting for a bed in the ward. She got her colonoscopy, all right. But she died two weeks later from metastasized colon cancer. That is called “ration care.” The same thing would happen to our seniors who are on Medicare today. They would be at the end of the line of those waiting to be treated.
The Hidden Costs of “Free” Government Healthcare
Bob Zadek: I remember growing up, it was always the smartest kids in the class who went to medical school. That was what you did if you were really, really smart. That was the career path. The doctors in America were the cream of the crop. In contrast, under single-payer healthcare, if the salaries and the payments go down, we are going to get people in the middle.
If you are being treated for health problems, do you want somebody who was in the middle of their class, who was an underachiever, or do you want the best person who can do it. Are you not willing to reward them for helping you out of a health problem? Under single-payer, the market disappears and we no longer attract the best and the brightest into healthcare. Now, we attract bureaucrats who are willing to work for a bureaucrat’s salary.
I’m a finance guy — as my audience knows. I’m a lawyer; a lender. So finance always helps me understand issues. Under a single-payer plan, Sanders is going to raise taxes considerably. So the question in policy issues always is, “is the ultimate cost for healthcare higher or less?” This is a two-part question. If it is higher and we are going to end up paying more for healthcare, then who will pay for that healthcare? Bernie Sanders says, “It’s really going to be less, because while you’ll be higher taxes you’ll save it in healthcare costs.”
So, if healthcare costs are going to go down, who is going to get paid less money. Is it the doctors? Is it the hospitals? Is it the drug companies? Whose axe will be gored if we end up paying less for healthcare and can the system absorb that decline in income?
Sally Pipes: If we do get a single-payer system where all private coverage is outlawed, a million people who are employed in the insurance industry will lose their jobs. The bureaucracy within the federal government will have to increase significantly. The second point is that we all know that governments are not as efficient at running things as the private sector is.
If you look at the department of motor vehicles, and how long and difficult it is to get an appointment to get your driver’s license renewed or do the road test or get one of these new ID cards, you know there is no incentive for people in the government to provide efficient service. So if people like the DMV or the post office… For example, the post office has become a little more efficient because there is competition between DHL and UPS and FedEx.
People use FedEx or one of the private services if they want to make sure they get something to someone quickly. If they’re not so concerned, then they will use the US Postal Service. But under Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal and Elizabeth Warren, all of the private options will be outlawed for anything considered “medically necessary.”
There will be a huge increase in the size of the civil service to pay the doctors and pay the hospitals and all of that. We will have a care card. We won’t be paying at the point of going to the doctor. The doctors and hospitals have to be paid. As I said, they are going to be paid less. They’ll be paid Medicare rates rather than what they are paid today.
The second point is that when people think something is free, it’s not. The average Canadian family pays $13,300 in hidden taxes every year for a healthcare system that doesn’t provide them with timely care. So, there will be huge tax increases that will be needed. The second point is that when people think something is free they demand a lot more of it. When Medicare and Medicaid came into being in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” it cost $3 billion in the first year.
They predicted it would cost $12 billion by 1990. In effect, it cost $110 billion dollars.
When Bernie Sanders says this will reduce the cost of healthcare, it won’t, because there will be a lot more demand for healthcare. So there will be a lot more use and the price will go up. They are also talking about how 11 million illegal immigrants will be able to get free healthcare too. And I think that number is probably low. So we are going to have all kinds of problems that exist in the U.K. and Canada.
In fact, as I mentioned earlier, Britain has a private option. Canada, North Korea, and Cuba are the only three countries in the world that have a true single-payer healthcare system where private coverage is banned. That is what Sanders, Warren, Bill De Blasio, and Senator Kamala Harris want.
Think back to Michael Bublé, the Canadian crooner who was very popular in the United States. His three-year-old son Noah was diagnosed with liver cancer and he didn’t go to the cancer agency in Vancouver. They went to UCLA and had his son treated there. They paid out of pocket. He chose UCLA because they have the best facilities and the best treatment for liver cancer. And his son is still alive today.
Look at Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stone, he had a heart problem. He didn’t go fly to Britain to get his heart valve replacement done under the National Health Service. He had it done at New York Presbyterian. His brother said, “Thank goodness that Mick don’t have to stand in line for healthcare. The United States has the very best healthcare in the world.”
People come from all over the world to use it, and if we are going to turn our system upside down and let the government run it like the DMV, I can tell you, it is going to be a disaster. The American people need to know this.
Another point is that a hundred and eighty million Americans get their health coverage through their employer and 76% percent of them rate their employer-based coverage as “good” or “excellent.” But, in the latest Kaiser Family Foundation poll, they found that 51% percent of the people they polled support Medicare for All, which was down from the fifty six percent in April. I’m hoping that people like myself talking about this is causing some people to wake up and say “This is not what we want for our healthcare system.”
When you tell these people, “You know that means that you will lose your employer sponsored coverage?” they are absolutely astounded. Even Democrats are surprised. Under single-payer coverage they won’t.
So the support for Medicare for All goes down to 37% percent when people are told that they wouldn’t be able to keep their private coverage or ESI, and it also goes down to 37% percent when people say, “You are going to have to pay for this with increased and new taxes in order to cover this government takeover.”
Freedom and Choice Abandoned
Bob Zadek: That is because when people hear “Medicare for All,” what they hear in their brain is, “Medicare for them, but not for me,” so they don’t personalize it as you just pointed out. Milton Friedman, in a series on PBS in the 1970s still available on Youtube, is called “Free to Choose.”
“Free” and “choice” are two words near and dear to the heart of libertarians and other Americans.
Tell us about how selecting your doctor, changing your doctor, or getting a second opinion — all of the things that make us as Americans a relatively free market society, and pretty free in commerce — how the choice factor plays in? Do we have any choice whatsoever over how we get treated, when we get treated, whether or not we get treated, under a single-payer system? How does choice fit into it?
Right now we have the ultimate choice. We can change doctors, we can get second opinions, we can do our own research and say, “This is what I think. What do you think doctor?” Tell us about the interaction between choice and the system in a single-payer Medicare for All world?
Sally Pipes: Well, Milton Freedman and his wife Rose were the absolute best. Milton was my mentor. I just wonder how he would be coping with life as it is today, as we are seeing big pushes towards not just government takeover of healthcare, but also free college education, free this and free that. He knows there was no such thing as a free lunch.
Milton was a big fan of choice and competition. That’s the way the market works in both aspects of our lives. The only areas where it is not working is K-12 public education and the healthcare system. Milton wrote the forward to my first book called Miracle Cure: How to Solve America’s Healthcare Crisis and Why Canada Isn’t the Answer. If we have universal choice, it will lead to lower costs and more access for everybody.
The Current Options
Things like health savings accounts, telemedicine, etc., are ways we can open up our healthcare system so that people can get the kind of coverage and treatments that suit their needs and those of their families. We have employer-sponsored coverage, which as I said covers 180 million Americans. That was really the fault of the federal government back during World War II when wage and price controls were in effect. The government gave employers the ability to provide health coverage to their employees as a way to attract or keep people. Employees would get health coverage tax free. If you lost your coverage and went into the individual market, you would have to buy your health coverage with after-tax dollars.
So we have employer-sponsored coverage, we have individual coverage, we have PPO, “preferred provider plans,” we have HMO — “Health Maintenance Organizations” — which as you probably remember was a big way to cut costs back in the early nineties.
When people found out that they couldn’t see the doctor they wanted or get timely treatment, or couldn’t see specialists, HMO kind of went on its head and PPOs came in.
Of course, 50% of the healthcare in this country is already in the hands of the government. There is Medicare for our seniors, Medicaid for low income Americans, which of course has been expanded tremendously under Obamacare.
About 72 million Americans are now on the Medicaid program, which pays doctors even lower rates than those to treat Medicare patients. And then we have the “CHIP” program for children and then we have the Veterans Administration, which of course is a single-payer system. We have read the accounts: there are many stories of problems with the VA and how our vets have to sit in long lines, don’t have access to the latest drugs, etc. That is a single-payer system. It would be a disaster if this was how it was for everyone.
Bob Zadek: I can’t imagine any freedom being more basic to dignity and humanness than the control of our body and management of our health and well-being. Right now, Americans have a considerable amount of choice, limited only by financial resources. We can choose who to treat us, who to seek opinions from, etc. We can change doctors and we can, through the marketplace, insist that we get treated with dignity, fairly, and most importantly, effectively. Tell us briefly, how that control would be diminished or eliminated under single-payer?
Sally Pipes: As I pointed out, under a single-payer system where the government is the only provider, care will be rationed. I mentioned the story of my mother. Older people will have less access. There will be long waiting lists for care because government would set a global budget on how much is going to be spent on healthcare.
So, Canada spends about 11% of gross domestic product on healthcare. We spend over 18% of our GDP on healthcare, but we are a very wealthy country, and Americans demand the very best. When they want to see a doctor and want to get a test, they ask for it. Whereas in Canada, by spending 11% of GDP on healthcare, care has to be rationed and waits grow, and you have to see your primary care first before getting a referral to a specialist, which takes five months.
There’s a doctor shortage. Taxes have to go up significantly. Kamala Harris is talking about taxing the sale of stocks and bonds and on people within the top earning brackets. But people need to realize there aren’t that many very wealthy people that are going to be able to provide the tax money for this, for a total expansion of our government takeover of our health system.
There would be new taxes on large financial institutions. There would be higher employer payroll taxes. Vermont, the home state of Senator Sanders (who is a big proponent of single-payer) passed a single-payer system in 2011. Their Democratic governor, Mr. Shumlin, had to reverse the bill that he had signed because he said the people of Vermont could not afford a single-payer system.
In Colorado, Amendment 69 is on the ballot. In 2016 even John Hickerlooper said they couldn’t afford it. He was on the Democratic ticket.
I think he’s going to run for the Senate in Colorado under the Democratic ticket. He was the one that told the people of Colorado that they couldn’t afford a single-payer system because it would more than double the state budget. And that went down 79% to 21, which was a huge defeat for single-payer.
Bob Zadek: California did the same analysis and reached the same conclusion.
Sally Pipes: Back in 2017, the California Senate passed a single-payer bill, and it was tossed out by the California Senate Appropriations Committee at $400 billion a year — more than double the budget of the state of California at the time, which was at about $190 billion. So when it went to the house, which was controlled by the Democrats as well, Anthony Rendon, the speaker, said, “We can’t afford this. I’m not going to bring it to a vote.” The Democrats in 2018 have a supermajority in the Senate and in the Assembly.
Gavin Newsom ran under single-payer, but when he was elected he started doing stepping stone approaches, such as the individual mandate (removed from Obamacare), and next year the subsidies of people who buy coverage on Covered California (a version of the Obamacare exchange), that the subsidies will be at about 400% of the federal poverty level, declining down as your income goes up. And that’s about a subsidy federally that would be on a family earning about a $103,000. That would be the maximum. Here in California it is going to go up to 600% of the federal poverty level. So a family of four can earn up to $150,000 and be eligible for a subsidy.
The third point is that he increased the age at which illegal immigrants could get medical coverage. One third of the population of California today is on Medical. 13 million out of 39 million. So he increased that age from 19 up to 26. He says that it’ll cost $98 million and will cover 90,000 undocumented immigrants. I say that it probably costs a lot more than that. A number of young undocumented immigrants in other states are going to come to California to get this free medical coverage.
We are seeing more and more middle income and higher income people flooding out of the state of California. I do believe that Gavin Newson still supports single-payer, but he realizes he has to do it slowly because the taxpayers of California cannot afford a $400 billion healthcare bill.
The Antithesis of Free Choice
Caller: What about naturopathic medicine? Is there no choice for that?
Sally Pipes: All private coverage would be outlawed under a single-payer system. So some people said to me, well, you know, I have a concierge doctor and I pay privately. Well that is outlawed in Canada as well. So under Bernie’s plan, under Senator Warren’s plan, there would be no concierge medicine.
The question is, where would Americans go? It is going to result in less bright kids going to medicine. There is a role for naturopaths, and doctors of osteopathy, etc. People have different views. We need a lot of competition, that’s what makes America great. By adopting single-payer we make the government completely in charge, so they will decide what treatments are available and what doctors should be paid for.
Doctors will basically be members of the government union. Your caller may be the best neurosurgeon, and I may be the worst, but we will be paid the same. Merit is not figured into what we you are paid. Many hospitals will go out of business. Right now hospitals get about 87 cents on the dollar for treating Medicare patients. But those people who have private coverage pay more in order to subsidize to keep the hospital in business.
Bob Zadek: A couple of observations. My blood is starting to boil because as Sally has used the word “illegal” numerous times during the program. My head is exploding because of the fact that my selecting a physician to treat me because I trust that physician and I am willing to reward him for competence and for helping me get better, is illegal. How could the act of a willing buyer and a willing seller of services be illegal? How could that be prohibited? It is a transaction between two consenting adults!
Bob’s Solution
Bob Zadek: That alone should cause us to storm the ramparts and say “no” to anything that criminalizes my selecting a healthcare professional. Now Sally, all of this talk about Medicare for All and single-payer popped up in public conversation quite a while ago to cure a problem, and I think it all got blurred. But as I can recall, the core problem that Sanders et al. is trying to cure is that some people are not getting the medical care that some politician thinks they’re entitled to.
They say “Healthcare is a right.” Therefore, to cure the problem of a small subset of the population not having the level of care that a politician decides they are entitled to, we are now going to reshuffle 11 or 14% of the entire economy. What I don’t understand is, if we feel that way — if Sanders feels that way, why not leave everything in place and just give money to them?
If that’s what the political system wants, it’s so easy. You don’t have to mess with the rest of us and our private insurance that we like. Just give people who can’t afford it free care. If that’s what the political system wants. I don’t understand the need to rejuggle 14% of our economy just to fix a relatively small problem.
Also, that same subset of the population who doesn’t get, in the opinion of the politicians, “adequate healthcare,” probably aren’t getting adequate food, adequate clothing, and adequate housing. We’re not making all housing public or making all food sales public, so the government runs it. We are just giving them, in a discreet way, these needs. So why isn’t the cure for a very discrete problem a very discrete cure?
Sally Pipes: You are absolutely right. When Obama was the President he promised the American people he was going to fix the healthcare system if elected president, and sure enough on March 23, 2010, he introduced Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, which of course has proved not to be affordable. Average premiums have gone up significantly: 21 to 28%.
Because of all the mandates and the essential health benefits under Obamacare, a lot of people that had participated early in the exchange and found that they couldn’t afford the premiums, and deductibles were so high that they couldn’t afford to use the coverage if they had it. Obama promised the American people that the cost of care would go down and the average family would see their health premiums go down by $2,500 a year. That is absolutely not the case at all. We have now about 7 million people on the exchanges, either the federal exchange, healthcare.gov or some of the states that have their own exchanges like here in California. We’ve turned the whole healthcare system upside down under Obamacare for 10.7 million people. It would have been easier and cheaper to provide these people with coverage.
Bob Zadek: There was allegedly malnutrition in parts of our country. Young children are going hungry. Well, give them food. You don’t private make all the supermarkets public!
If people don’t have healthcare and the political process decides they deserve it — I don’t feel that way), but if the political process decides that — then without upsetting the rest of the country, just fix that specific problem as we always do.
There was allegedly malnutrition in parts of our country. Young children are going hungry. Well, give them food. You don’t private make all the supermarkets public!
Trump’s Proposal to Buy Cheap Drugs from Canada
Bob Zadek: President Trump has floated a measure to allow Americans to buy and import the same drugs we buy in the U.S. allegedly, at a higher price, form Canada, who allegedly has them at a lower price, because the Canadian government negotiates lower drug prices. Tell us whether you support or oppose Trump’s proposal to allow Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canadian vendors at a lower price than we could buy them from here. Do you oppose or support it, and why?
Sally Pipes: I oppose it and I’ll explain why. Interestingly, two states, Florida and Colorado, have signed a bill allowing for the importing of drugs from Canada. President Trump has said that he will be releasing his fabulous new health care plan in September. One thing will be included is an international price index, which will tie drug pricing to a basket of drugs in other countries, and these would be for patients receiving cancer drugs in doctor’s offices.
Canada is a country with thirty nine million people. You have two states that have signed bills importing drugs from Canada, and there are about 11 other states that want to do the same thing.
Canada does not have that supply of drugs. Canadian officials have come out just recently and said, “We cannot be the drugstore for the United States.” Canada’s drug prices are cheaper because American pharmaceuticals, where all of the research and development is done, costs $2.6 billion (from an idea to bring a drug to market). Most of them don’t don’t make it. Because Canada has price controls on pharmaceuticals, our pharmaceutical companies sell to Canada and to the U.K. and to other countries with price controls at these lower prices. But if America starts importing drugs from Canada, there will be no drug outlets for Canadians. It will destroy one of the biggest industries in the U.S., the pharmaceutical industry.
Bob Zadek: So, the savings that Americans enjoy will be at the expense of the drug companies who will have to cut back on their research budgets and therefore the supply of new drugs will be harmed. Sally, in 2020 healthcare will be the issue on the ballot. Your book will be released in January. Tell us what the premise of your book is and why it is a must read for Americans who will vote in 2020.
Sally Pipes: I tell everyone why single-payer is a disaster. I use Canada and Britain as examples. I have a whole chapter on why healthcare is not a human “right.” Then I devise a solution on how we can reform our healthcare system.
Links:
- PRE-ORDER: Amazon.com: False Premise, False Promise: The Disastrous Reality of Medicare for All: Sally C. Pipes
- BUY: The False Promise of Single-Payer Health Care (2018)
- Don’t Buy The Democrats’ ‘Moderate’ Alternatives To Medicare For All by Sally Pipes, Forbes
- @SallyPipes on Twitter
- New Poll: Medicare for All Is Popular Until You Explain How It Works — Reason.com, Peter Suderman
Related Shows:
- Government health care will make you sick, July 12, 2009
- Will Americans Accept Second Class Medicine? September 15, 2013 with Jeffrey Singer
- Obamacare and The Loss of America March 28, 2010.
