As Democrats continue a coordinated effort to convince Americans, without evidence, that the Trump administration plans to dismantle Medicare and perhaps Social Security, some on the far-left plan to introduce an old "Medical for All" plan to expand the expensive over-65 government-run medical system to include almost all Americans.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) along with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) said Tuesday they're planning the Medicare for All Act, a potential bill that would have to pass Congress to become possible and which would likely face a veto from President Donald Trump.
"I have no reason to believe the bill they file this Congress will be any different than the bills they've previously filed, and what it does is, it effectively does away with Medicare," political consultant David Balant says.
"It would effectively create a nationalized health care system. Y'know, Medicare is pretty well thought-of, it polls well, so no one wants to touch Medicare. So they want to re-do it.
"But it's not true. It's not Medicare. You're creating something new and you're just calling it Medicare. And based on their history, we can't expect them to run the program very well, to be quite honest. It's untested, it's unknown and there's no way of knowing what it will do," Balant says.
With no notion of reforming the current system, the Sanders-Jayapal-Dingell idea would end Medicare as we know it. So they're essentially saying they want to do what they claim President Trump wants to do -- end Medicare as we know it.
"They've already had the opportunity to fix the current system, they're unwilling to do that because of financial interests and lobbyists, so they're going to ration care in order to be able to afford [Medicare for All], because that's what national health care systems do.
"We saw that with the NHS system in the United Kingdom. A few years ago they were talking about group visits with the doctor to make things more efficient, they were talking about not providing certain procedures for people over a certain age, they were talking about doing cataract surgery but only doing one eye because that should be good enough.
"Same thing with Costa Rica. One person suspected of having ovarian cancer was scheduled to be given a diagnostic test prior to surgery. That diagnostic test scheduled for a year later. The surgery then was probably scheduled for a year after that."