Boots & Sabers

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Owen

Everything but tech support.
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1132, 01 Sep 19

Bernie Proposes Canceling all Medical Debt

Do I really have to explain why this is stupid and harmful? Apparently I do because some of y’all support this communist.

Sanders’s plan would cancel $81 billion in existing past-due medical debt, repeal parts of the 2005 bankruptcy reform bill and ensure that unpaid medical bills do not impact one’s credit score. Sanders has hit the 2005 bill for eliminating “fundamental consumer  protections,” accusing it of making it difficult for Americans to pay back medical debt by imposing stringent means tests.

“In the United States of America, your financial life and future should not be destroyed because you or a member of your family gets sick,” Sanders said in a news release previewing his plan.

Let’s play this out, shall we? Let’s say Sanders gets elected and cancels all medical debt. All of the people who owe the money presumably received quality medical care for which they did not have the money readily available. Whether or not those medical fees were “too expensive” is not germane to the discussion because Bernie isn’t talking about only canceling debt where the medical provider could be shown to have overcharged for their service.

The people received quality medical from professionals who trained for years and with, in most cases, advanced medical technology and medicine. The patients didn’t have the money at the time, so they incurred a debt. What happens when Bernie cancels it? Who is left holding the bag? The medical professionals and medical companies who provided the service are stiffed for their services.

How will they react? If you were stiffed out of money owed to you, how would you react? Most people would stop providing services unless people have the money up front. If the government can just cancel the debt, then why would you work for free? You wouldn’t. The only people you would reasonable provide services for would be people with the money (in cash and/or pre-qualified insurance) in hand.

If medical professionals stop providing services unless the patients pay up front, who is harmed? The people who don’t have the cash, of course. For rich people, this isn’t a problem. They can pay for it. The people who are harmed are the people in the middle and lower class. Sure, some of them could use a credit card, but how long would it take credit companies to stop allowing their cards to be used for medical services if the government can cancel the debt? Left without a way to incur debt to pay for services, the people in the middle and lower classes would be left without access to medical care.

And here we finally get to Bernie’s real motivation… if doctors and other medical professionals refuse to provide services for free to people in the middle and lower classes, how will Bernie, the communist, respond? He will respond the same way communists always respond. He will use the violent force of government to force them to do so. He will say that the government should compel medical professionals to surrender their time and talents to the collective. If they refuse, they will be denied a license to earn a living or worse.

And here again… who does that hurt? If qualified medical professionals are compelled to either work for free or leave the profession, many of them will choose another profession. With fewer and fewer medical professionals available, and the best and brightest certainly looking elsewhere to earn a living, it is the people in the middle and lower classes who will be denied service. This time they won’t be denied service because they don’t have the money. This time they will be denied service because there just isn’t anyone there to provide it.

Welcome to communism. This is how it always ends because the tenets of communism are not aligned with human nature and it relies on violence to bend, or break, people to its will.

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1132, 01 September 2019

12 Comments

  1. Kevin Scheunemann

    Well put!

  2. dad29

    What Bernie doesn’t think about?  Violence goes both ways.

  3. steveegg

    It’s kind of hard to depopulate the US, and ultimately the planet, with plentiful quality health care.

  4. Kevin Scheunemann

    Savage.

  5. jjf

    Don’t jump to too many conclusions too fast, Owen.  Sanders’ plan is to have the Federal government pay off all that debt.  In other words, we’d all pay for it eventually.  And who said anything about medical people not being paid or being forced to work for free?

  6. Owen

    Um, who’s jumping to things? Here is the entirety of Bernie’s proposal, in which he doesn’t say anything about the taxpayers paying for it:

    • Cancel the entire $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt for the 45 million borrowers who are weighed down by the crushing burden of student debt. This will save around $3,000 a year for the average student loan borrower.

     

    https://berniesanders.com/issues/college-for-all/

  7. jjf

    It only took me a few seconds of googling to find other stories where it showed he wanted the government to pay for the medical debt pay-off.

    $80 billion on war, no one blinks an eye.  $80 billion as part of his larger plan to change the health care landscape, you’re right there with the doctors enslaved under armed guard.  Drinking a little too much Ayn Rand today?

    I’m not really here to defend any of Sanders’ plans.  I’m just pointing out that you’re going off half-cocked here.

  8. Owen

    Yeah, politicians say all sorts of things when rambling in front of a crowd. I’m reading his actual plan.

  9. jjf

    So where did you read about the Randian scary story of doctors working at the point of a gun?  Is that in some actual plan, or just your bedtime story?

  10. Owen

    The rest is the logical outcome of that policy decision as has been demonstrated in every communist country for well over a century.

  11. jjf

    Which countries had a policy decision to pay off private medical debts in a situation similar to this?

    Or is this just the Russian / Chinese boogeyman?  Ask the orange one, the Russians are our friends now.  It’s hard to tell whether the Chinese are our friends now.  We’ll need to ask Ivanka.

  12. Merlin

    >It’s kind of hard to depopulate the US, and ultimately the planet, with plentiful quality health care.

    Steve wins this one bigly.

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