Ah, what a difference 30 years make!
Back in 1987, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was the Socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and — as can be seen in this clip — he was talking to Canadian physician Milton Terris as part of a local-access cable TV show he hosted called “Bernie Speaks.”
The two men were debating the disparate health care programs of the United States and Canada. Clearly, Sanders is envious of the Canadian program, which features a single-payer system. But as you can see in this bombshell clip, Sanders admits that a similar system in the United States, which would expand Medicaid to “everyone in the nation,” would bankrupt our country.
The fact of the matter is that Canada has a very, very different (and Socialist) form of government than the United States. How the government deals with insurance companies and drug companies is vastly different.
Flash forward to this past week, and it was Sanders who proposed a single-payer health-care system at a press conference to the mass media. Sanders lined up 16 Democratic legislators who he already had on board with his program. In fact, one-third of all Senate Democrats have endorsed Sanders’ plan, including usual suspects (and potential presidential candidates) Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker. What Sanders — and naturally, all the other Democratic lawmakers — didn’t talk about, however, was how the plan would be paid for.
A white paper floating around Washington suggests that tax hikes over the next decade or so of roughly $16.9 trillion would cover some of the costs, but not all (in fact, the percentage that would be covered is still unclear). Already, hospitals and doctors’ groups are lining up to oppose Sanders’ ideas. Democrats running next year for the House and Senate in states where Donald Trump won the presidential vote have yet to voice support for the measure.
Perhaps if lawmakers turn their video dials back 30 years, they might see that even Sanders himself doesn’t believe in this “pie-in-the-sky” idea. Watch, as Sanders hangs himself with his own words from three decades ago!
