Sanders Proposes $1.38 Trillion/Year Health Care To Include Coverage For All "Aspiring Americans"

...and all he need is 6 measly tax hikes in order to fund his "Medicare for All", a comprehensive Universal Health Care program that would put Obamacare to shame by including coverage to every American citizens, legal U.S residents, and all other "aspiring Americans" (a Bernie's Original euphemism for Illegal Immigrants) in the country.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/01/18/bernie-sanders-universal-health-care-plan-to-cover-illegal-aliens/

 

Sanders "Medicare for All" would cover illegal immigrants
By Gabriel Debenedetti and Kyle Cheney

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CHARLESTON, S.C. — Millions of undocumented immigrants would gain health care coverage under Bernie Sanders' plan for a single-payer health care system, a detail he didn't include explicitly in his just-released proposal but one confirmed by an aide shortly after Sunday's Democratic presidential debate.

"It would cover everyone, including aspiring Americans," said Warren Gunnels, senior policy adviser to the Vermont senator's campaign, when asked whether the plan would cover immigrants in the country illegally.

That proposal separates Sanders' plan even further from Obamacare, whose framers carefully excluded undocumented immigrants from any form of assistance or access to coverage offered through the law.

Spoiler

The acknowledgment ensures that Sanders' already politically treacherous push for "Medicare for All" will end up entangled with messy immigration politics that have roiled the 2016 election cycle. It also could add fuel to Hillary Clinton's argument that her rival's proposal is unrealistic in today's partisan climate, which she lodged during Sunday's debate. During the primetime showdown, she noted that a push for a scaled-down single payer health care system — the so-called public option — was scuttled during the 2009-2010 fight over Obamacare, when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress.

Sanders, along with immigration advocacy groups, has long lamented that Obamacare left an estimated 10 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants without access to coverage through the law's exchanges, though aides emphasized to the Washington Post last fall that he didn't necessarily support offering them subsidies to afford coverage. Clinton, similarly, said during the October debate that she'd favor allowing undocumented immigrants to buy coverage through Obamacare exchanges, but not with subsidies.

"I want to open up the opportunity for immigrants to be able to buy in to the exchanges under the Affordable Care Act," she said. "I think to go beyond that ... so that they would get the same subsidies, I think that is — it raises so many issues. It would be very difficult to administer, it needs to be part of a comprehensive immigration reform, when we finally do get to it."

Sanders released the outline of his universal health care plan just two hours before Sunday's debate, an effort to curtail attacks from Clinton that his plan would gut Obamacare, Medicare and a federal health program for kids. During the debate, Clinton insisted she's "absolutely committed to universal health care." But she argued that it isn't worth reopening a "contentious" fight over the issue,

Sanders countered by accusing her of mounting a "Republican" attack on his health care plan by pointing to the taxes it would take to fund it.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/...-undocumented-immigrants-217931#ixzz3zlMAAGKi

 

Clinton Attacks Sanders’ $14 Trillion Health Plan as ‘Wishful Thinking’
By Eric Pianin
February 5, 2016
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Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont clashed Thursday night over the future of federal health care policy and the federal tax code, taking starkly different positions that may eventually prove pivotal in the selection of the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.

Sanders, the “revolutionary” socialist insisted his multi-trillion-dollar national health care plan funded by major tax hikes was both feasible and necessary, while the more pragmatic Clinton dismissed it as “wishful thinking” and vowed to build on the existing Affordable Care Act.

In one heated exchange, Clinton accused Sanders of trying to plunge the nation and Congress back into another prolonged and likely futile battle over health care coverage that would jeopardize the future of Obamacare and the millions of Americans currently enrolled in the program. “I don’t want to rip away the security that people finally have,” she said.

Sanders strongly denied that he would stand by and allow Obamacare to be dismantled by the Republicans while seeking support for his far more ambitious plan for a national health program to replace current government programs and private insurance coverage.

“Every major country on earth, whether it’s the [United Kingdom] whether it’s France, whether it’s Canada, has managed to provide health care to all people as a right, and they are spending significantly less per capita on health care than we are, he said. “So I do not accept the belief that the United States of America can’t do that.”

Sanders did not acknowledge that health care in Britain is rationed as it is in other developed countries, and that not everyone is eligible for the services that Medicare provides in the U.S.

Spoiler

While the two remaining opponents in the Democratic presidential campaign agreed that the ultimate goal was to extend health care insurance to the 29 million Americans currently uninsured by Obamacare, their approaches are radically different and go to the essential difference between the two veteran politicians’ strategies:

Clinton believes Sanders’ health care and tax proposals are utopian and will never pass in a Congress likely to be controlled by the Republicans for years to come. Sanders insists voters are hungry for visionary ideas that will shatter traditional thinking by the political establishment.

Health care reform takes a back seat to concerns about the heroin epidemic in New Hampshire, but it has far more saliency among voters nationally. The high cost of health care and insurance ranks third in the concern of voters across the country, just behind terrorism and the economy, according to a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Sanders favors replacing current federal health care programs, including Obamacare, with a government funded “Medicare for all” program that would include the 29 million Americans currently uncovered by Obamacare, who include illegal immigrants. The plan would echo national health care programs in Canada, Europe and Scandinavia.

Sanders says his plan would provide full medical and prescription drug coverage and reduce the annual cost to consumers by eliminating the need to purchase private health insurance policies with ever-mounting premiums and co-payments. The new program would also crack down on the pharmaceutical industry and bring down soaring drug costs.

He claims his “single-payer” program would cost the government an additional $1.4 trillion a year – or $14 trillion over the coming decade. He would offset the cost by raising revenues from a combination of taxes on average workers, employers, investors, estates and the wealthiest earners.

While that would mean higher taxes on middle-income and even some lower income Americans, Sanders argues that the net effect of those taxes on many would be negligible, because they no longer would have to pay premiums and copayments on private health insurance under Obamacare.

“If you are paying $10,000 a year to a private health insurance company, and I say to you, hypothetically, that you are going to pay $5,000 more a year in taxes…but you’re not going to pay any more private health insurance, are you going to be complaining about the fact that I’ve saved you $5,000 in your total bills?” he said recently.

Clinton dismisses Sanders’ proposal as unworkable, and vows to work to preserve and expand Obamacare if she is elected president. “I’m not making promises I can’t keep,” she said repeatedly.

Moreover, she questions key elements of Sanders’ proposals and insists, “The numbers just don’t add up from what Sen. Sanders has been proposing. That’s why all the independent experts, all the editorial boards that have better both of us have concluded that it is just not achievable,” she said of Sanders’ health care initiatives.


http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/...ders-14-Trillion-Health-Plan-Wishful-Thinking

 

Hell of a lot cheaper than what is spent now.

I'm more worried about what is going to happen with health insurance employees. Sure, most of them are utterly worthless, especially management, but they aren't all going to go to work for Medicaid.

 

As long as they find a way to make them pay taxes i dont see the problem, they are still a drag to the healthcare system.

 

Lmao @ the Dems actually about to nominate Bernie Sanderclaus. But I suppose when your other option is Hillary you don't have much of a choice.

 

Would this increase illegals coming through the border to get medical treatment? Does Mexico have a universal healthcare of their own to take care of the poor?

 

I wonder how many people saying "no" are pro-life and pretend like they actually care about human life...

 

People care about human life until you add a price tag to it.

 

this guy will never get nominated. it's theater designed to make it look like a "close race" with Hildog.

 

And how is that worse than spending 3.8 trillion on a private system as we do now? Seems to me like it saves us over 2 trillion.

Also how come MONEY is the be all and end all in a debate about healthcare? Shouldn't cost be secondary to healthcare outcomes and human life?

Oh, and illegals already have free healthcare in this country it's called the emergency room.

 

Since Bernie wants to follow Europe's grand social experiment with free benefits for all and a wide-open border, you can ask the tax-paying Europeans in the forum to see how's that working out for them.

There's no doubt that we are paying up the ass for medical care, with many contributing factors involved, such as hospitals shifting the millions in unpaid Emergency Room costs from non-paying patients (illegal immigrants, birth tourists, etc) over to the paying customers, high prescription drug prices, and so on.

What we do have is shorter wait time at the hospital compare to many other countries with universal heath care after they got overwhelmed by newly-arrived benefits receipients, and the U.S consistently outrank many of them in quality of service. You get what you pay for, I guess.

That being said, there are many things we can do to slash heath care cost without hurting the quality, like say, a big chunk of money would be saved from Big Pharma's fleecing if Medicare and Medicaid is allowed to leverage and negotiate drug prices by buying in bulk.

Private heath insurance providers are still in business as a supplemental service model in countries with Universal Heath Care, paid for by employers as well as people who could pay extra out of their pocket to get the many products and services not covered by the tax-funded heath insurance (dental, optometry, expensive drugs, etc).

Last I heard, around 75% of Canadians receive supplemental private heath insurance from their employment.

 

Y'all are acting like illegal immigrants don't already get free healthcare. At least here they gotta get on the books to do it.

 

Lmao @ "aspiring Americans." We all know calling illegal immigrants "illegal immigrants" is a no-no in PC-land. What a gross cuck.

 

Candidates on both sides have presented ideas that would never in a million years be approved by Congress.

 

Anybody in support of this shit proposal loses any right to complain about six hour wait times in the emergency waiting room, drug shortages and understaffing at medical facilities.

 

Sanders is a lunatic.....

 

Doesn't make sense if it would include illegal immigrants.

That would mean it includes the entire planet as long as they could show up.

 

Did he come up with this name? Hes a shit sucking dog that needs to die in a fire. they arent aspiring Americans they are fucking criminals who come over here and leech off the system and have anti gringo days.

 

+1000

pretty sure socialist countries do the same for "aspiring immigrants". Pretty sure my brother was offered healthcare within a week after he emigrated from america.