It’s a distant memory now, but Donald Trump publicly supported single-payer health care. Vice President Kamala Harris did, too. Neither candidate backs the idea now. This easily accessible history didn’t stop Trump from attacking Harris on Thursday as if she still supports single-payer — with the former president arguing that it would be bad to do so.
During a rambling press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump said of Harris: “She cosponsored legislation to abolish very popular private health insurance, which 150 [million] Americans rely on, dumping everyone onto inferior socialist government run health care systems with rationing and deadly wait times, while massively raising your taxes. She wants to take away your private health care.”
“It’s the best health care in the world,” he continued, adding: “You’re all going to be thrown into a communist system … You’re going to be thrown into a system where everybody gets health care.”
None of this is true. Harris did previously support eliminating private health insurance in favor of enacting “Medicare for All,” or a universal health insurance program. She has since backed away from this idea. While Harris has not offered her health care plan yet, her spokesperson recently told NBC News, “The VP will not push single payer as president.”
The United States’ health care system is exceptional, but not because it provides the best care in the world. Americans pay far more for health care than residents of other high-income countries — like Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Australia — and experience the worst health outcomes. Our life expectancy is lower; infant, maternal, and avoidable deaths are all higher.
While taxes would increase under a Medicare for All-style system, studies show Americans would save money in the aggregate. Today, more than 8 percent of Americans are uninsured, and tens of millions are underinsured, meaning they have insurance but cannot afford to access the health services they need. On a financial level, forgoing medical care ultimately creates larger health expenses. Insurers also regularly deny patients’ care, because it helps pad their profits.
Trump claimed Thursday that, if the U.S. were to have a universal health care system, “You wait for your doctor, like 10 months, 12 months, 11 months, you gotta see some of these plans, how they work in other countries, it’s disgraceful.”
Wait times in the U.S. are already long — not the absolute worst among wealthy countries, but poor nonetheless.
Trump reiterated at the end of his health care rant that Harris “could change” her position. “She’s changed on everything,” he said.
So has Trump. Years ago, he was a full-blown proponent of single-payer health care.
“If you can’t take care of your sick in the country, forget it, it’s all over. I mean, it’s no good. So I’m very liberal when it comes to health care,” Trump told Larry King in 1999. “I believe in universal health care. I believe in whatever it takes to make people well and better.”
He added that health care should be considered “an entitlement.”
In his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump wrote that America should “reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing.” He wrote favorably about the Canadian single-payer system: “Administrative costs across America make up 25 percent of the health care dollar, which is two-and-a-half times the cost of health care administration in Canada. Doctors might be paid less than they are now, as is the case in Canada, but they would be able to treat more patients because of the reduction in their paperwork. The Canadian plan also helps Canadians live longer and healthier than Americans.”
Trump did not support a single-payer health care system during his 2016 campaign, but he still defended the idea in a Republican debate.
“As far as single payer, it works in Canada,” he said. “It works incredibly well in Scotland. It could have worked in a different age.”
From Rolling Stone US
