Letter: McHenry is wrong about single-payer health care

Graphic by Lori Deaton

Rep. Patrick McHenry is reported to have told his Town Hall audience that single-payer health insurance would cost $32 trillion “… and thus be too expensive.”

Like so many in the GOP on this topic, he only gets it half right. The other half is that our current system costs $49 trillion, meaning single-payer could save the nation some $17 trillion over 10 years.

This data is easy to find, but if McHenry is sincere in his comments, he can check out Physicians for a National Healthcare Program (PNHP.org). Or, he could co-sponsor the “Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act” (H.R. 676), which more than a record 104 of his House colleagues have already done.

Just imagine — some $17 trillion in savings, and health care for everyone! We know the way, sir. We just need the political will.

— Stephen Advokat
Physicians for a National Healthcare Program
Asheville

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20 thoughts on “Letter: McHenry is wrong about single-payer health care

  1. bsummers

    The only way they can win this issue is to keep coming up with new lies to tell. Death Panels!!!!!, etc. etc. etc….

    But the truth is getting harder and harder to avoid. Remember 7 years ago, when Obamacare was being debated? Talk of single-payer was verboten. Now it’s becoming clear – it’s the only solution, and it’s cheaper to boot.

    • Lulz

      LOL, gee how much more gimmies do you have to dole out for votes? Cause leftist sure as hell don’t stand for anything else.

      • bsummers

        Did you even read the info in the above letter? No one is asking for a “gimmie”. As a nation, we’re currently paying way too much for healthcare, while millions don’t have access to it at all. Single-payer means we would be paying less than we currently do, and everyone would be covered. The benefits to society as a whole would be enormous – increased productivity in the workforce, the end to healthcare-related bankruptcies, the end of failing hospitals & fights like the one going on between BCBS and Mission, etc. etc.

          • luther blissett

            The UK doesn’t have a single-payer system. Try to keep up.

            The US spends $9,900 per person per year on healthcare. The UK spends $4,200. Germany spends about $5,500. France and Canada spend about $4,600. The US doesn’t get twice as good healthcare for twice the money.

            For somebody who is angry about so many things, why aren’t you angry about being ripped off every step of the way when you get sick?

          • bsummers

            Your article there doesn’t mention anything about ‘overweight’ OR ‘smokers’ OR ‘long waiting lists’. It talks about how the Conservative Party in the UK is cutting funds to the health service (putting people’s health at risk), and lying about it. (Gotta pay for those huge corporate tax cuts somehow, right?)

            Do you actually read these things before you claim they support your arguments? I’m just saying…

        • bsummers

          Speaking of stupid, selfish people who don’t even understand the basics of how insurance works, here’s one of Trump’s genius “advisors”:

          “People want insurance for their own families, not for other people’s families.”
          https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2017/09/19/cnns-stephen-moore-thinks-pre-existing-conditions-can-be-covered-some-kind-special-fund-so-other/217980

          Just let that sink in. These people want anyone who might conceivably drive up their healthcare costs, to be shoved out of the pool to die. The only cure for this downward spiraling, immoral attitude that’s taking root in America, is a single-payer system. We’re all in it together, and we all pay for access to healthcare equally. Otherwise, the profit motive among health insurance companies will always turn us against each other.

          • Lulz

            That’s because many are tired of working and funding others. No nation will thrive or continue when a shrinking pool of taxpayers are expected to fund another. Why our own Wanda Greene is a glaring example of how nepotism and corruption work with entrenched government bureaucrat cronies who are neither subject to voter approval and immune to job loss UNTIL they decide it’s time to go. No thanks.

            By all means go to Wal-Mart around the 3rd to 5th of each month. And see the 3 cart fulls of junk being purchased and paid for with EBT. Or at any convenience store that accepts EBT when someone purchases food on it and then pulls out a wad of cash to pay for lottery, cigs, and beer. Your problem is you assume people’s eyes are lying to them. Your problem is you live in La La Land.

          • luther blissett

            You literally can’t stop yourself from changing the subject.

            Go to the type 1 diabetes walk next month at the ball park and tell the little kids with insulin pumps that they deserve to be punished their entire lives. Your problem is that once you stop caring about anyone other than yourself, you have to invent ways to justify it.

          • Huhsure

            The Rand is strong in this one, Barry.

            Don’t you know selfishness is its own justification?

          • bsummers

            That’s a fairly coarse way to put it. You don’t want to hurt the poor Randian’s feelings do you? How about the gentle musing:

            “Thus, Objectivism contends, the fundamental right of human beings is the right to life. By this phrase Objectivism means the right to act in furtherance of one’s own life — not the right to have one’s life protected, or to have one’s survival guaranteed, by the involuntary effort of other human beings. Indeed, on the Objectivist account, one of the corollaries of the right to life is the right to property, which is assumed to always represent the product of one’s own effort…”

            In other words, to quote Pink Floyd:

            I’m alright Jack, keep your hands off of my stack.”

  2. jason

    McHenry’s a typical “bought and paid for” politician who’s campaign finances are completely dependent on BIG money; namely the INSURANCE industry

  3. luther blissett

    McHenry postponed his town hall because he got pneumonia and his doctor told him not to do public events. His problem is that his party thinks it’s okay for sick kids to die because their parents aren’t rich, or for people with chronic illnesses to be forced into disability instead of working, or for poor people to line up at 5am to see a doctor once a year. Free-market conservatives in every other developed nation don’t believe that’s okay.

    • NFB

      “His problem is that his party thinks it’s okay for sick kids to die because their parents aren’t rich, or for people with chronic illnesses to be forced into disability instead of working, or for poor people to line up at 5am to see a doctor once a year. ”

      And then they want us to believe that they are the “pro-life” party.

      • Lulz

        LOL but the VA with their waiting list is like so successful. Lemme guess, moar money is needed lulz.

  4. Deplorable Infidel

    luther, can you actually NAME some ‘free market conservatives’ from other developed nations for us ?

    • luther blissett

      Theresa May. Angela Merkel. Malcolm Turnbull. Bill English. Stephen Harper. Margaret Thatcher. Bibi Netanyahu. Every Japanese prime minister since the 1960s. And so on. In case you hadn’t noticed, right-wing governments are in charge of lots of developed nations right now. They may not be your idea (or McHenry’s idea) of conservative, but that says more about the isolation and extremism of American conservatism than about them.

      McHenry’s party doesn’t have an end goal for healthcare that doesn’t involve poor people dying of treatable illnesses or because they can’t manage chronic conditions, or having middle-class people driven to bankruptcy by medical bills. They could be forgiven if they were seeking to emulate a model of market-driven healthcare that exists successfully somewhere else in the developed world, but no such model exists.

      • Lulz

        Because vets don’t die at the VA while waiting for sometimes years. No thanks. You want single payer, it needs to be tied into EBT where those who are on gov assistance CANNOT buy junk food. Only in America are the so called poor also fat. Your crony shtick ain’t working no more. People see for themselves how corrupt and broken welfare is.

        • luther blissett

          The self-proclaimed champion of the working stiff apparently believes that the VA is single-payer — that would be Medicare — and that junk food causes multiple sclerosis. (Funding for the VA is always a political fight, and billions are signed off for the foreign wars that create VA patients without a second glance.) The self-proclaimed champion of the working stiff also apparently likes to punish poor people for the small pleasures they’re able to buy, pleasures mostly subsidized by tax dollars to corporate agriculture.

          “Only in America are the so called poor also fat.”

          No. But only in America do the deliberately ignorant consider themselves geniuses.

          At some point the self-described champion of the working stiff will have to define his demographic of the truly oppressed — what jobs they do, how much they earn — and his schtick will collapse like a cake in the rain.

          • Lulz

            Workers are dropping out of the workforce bud. Just because you think 30 buck entrees are cheap, well it’s also indicative of someone who won’t be relying on single payer either.

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