After reviewing last week’s craziness I am convinced that our politicians along with the media are truly dysfunctional and really lack civility. Look at the demonstrators who were interviewed during the next potential Supreme Court Judge’s “interrogation”. Most didn’t even know what they were demonstrating against or even what their signs meant. What a crazy world we live in!!

As the “New Democrats” declare their need to change us all and make our system based on socialism I found this interesting article.

Giancarlo Sopo wrote an Opinion contributor who stated that Cuba’s socialist revolution was supposed to work for workers — like his grandparents who lived in Miami during Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship this interesting article. In January 1959, just two weeks after Fidel Castro seized power, they returned to the island to care for his grandmother’s ailing mother. For the next 20 years, they remained prisoners in their own country. Democratic socialism is a lot like the system his family fled, except its proponents promise to be nicer when seizing your business.

As Cuba’s political and economic situation worsened, his grandfather told a friend he wanted to return to the United States. Someone overheard the conversation and reported him to the authorities. For this, the Castro regime threw him in jail. He was later stripped of his job and salary as an accountant and assigned to feed zoo animals. In addition to the emotional distress it caused, this made my family’s financial circumstances even more precarious.

To understand his grandparents’ desperation to flee socialism, imagine leaving everything behind and starting anew at almost 60 years old.

He, the writer was born in Miami a little after his family was able to return to America — when President Jimmy Carter allowed travel restrictions to lapse. Growing up, a framed photo of his parents with President Ronald Reagan was a mainstay in the living room of his modest duplex. Yet, during the first election, he was able to vote, he served as a precinct captain for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Four years later, he knocked on doors in New Hampshire for then-Sen. Barack Obama. In 2016, his wife and he drove 14 hours to volunteer for Hillary Clinton and this June, they marched in support of immigrant families.

The popularity of ‘democratic socialism’

Despite his working-class immigrant roots, he is concerned by the popularity of socialism within my party. On the night of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in New York, he thought that she used the term as a misnomer. He then began studying the views of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), remember that we discussed the various forms of socialism and the system here would be democratic socialism and now the rapidly growing national organization she belongs to and was disturbed by what he learned.

Like those of yesteryear, today’s socialists believe the government should nationalize major industries, propose eliminating private ownership of companies, and reject profits. In other words, democratic socialism is a lot like the system my family fled, except its proponents promise to be nicer when seizing your business.

When he confronted some progressive friends about this, they initially dismissed his concerns. After sharing some articles with them, the conversation shifted to “they just want us to be more like the Nordic countries” and “they’re not like real socialists!” Both are reductionist, self-delusions to avoid confronting difficult truths.

The latter is a particularly absurd fallacy because it requires one to believe that adults who willfully join socialist organizations, sound like socialists and call themselves socialists are not what they claim to be.

Claims of “Nordic socialism” are also largely exaggerated. As Jostein Skaar, of Oslo Economics, told him, “I would stress that the Norwegian economic system is capitalistic, heavily influenced by the U.S. and U.K.”

This is probably why DSA argues that the Nordic model is not good enough.

The ideological counterparts of America’s democratic socialists are likelier to be found to our south than in northern Europe. For instance, Cuba — where the state controls three-fourths of the economy, limits private-sector activity, and employs the majority of workers — is clearly more representative of DSA’s economic vision than Denmark, where 89 percent of the wealth is privately owned and seven out of 10 Danes work in the private sector.

Moreover, as an investigation by Transparency International revealed, the Venezuelan government owns at least 511 companies — resulting in a state-owned enterprise’s per-capita ratio that is more than three times greater than all of Scandinavia’s combined.

As someone who spent years defending Democrats from “socialista” charges, he understood why people roll their eyes when Cuba and Venezuela are mentioned alongside democratic socialism, but to reject the comparison simply because we don’t like those countries’ outcomes misses the point of why they turned out the way they did. He is under no illusion that increased access to health care and education will turn us into the Venezuelan capital Caracas, but it’s foolish to believe that democratic socialists — who promise to end capitalism — would be satisfied with Medicare for all if given the reins of power.

This must never happen. The descendants of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels should have no place in the party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Given its horrific record of human suffering, it would be a moral disgrace for Democrats to embrace socialism just to win elections, as some suggest. Those who use the blitheful ignorance of many for the political gain of a few deserve to lose. Indeed, if socialism represents the future of the Democratic Party, that’s a dystopia, no American should want to be a part of.

Britain’s Health Care System Demonstrates Perils of Socialized Medicine

Dr. Kevin Pham and Robert Moffit reviewed the British experience with socialized medicine and why those who want to convert our system to socialized medicine had better do some serious research first. Younger doctors who are flirting with the support of government-run health care should consider some hard facts—including the unfortunate results such control would likely have for patients and doctors themselves. They should also look at the recent raw experience of Britain with a government-controlled health care system.

But first, let’s look at the most serious plan for government-run health care: Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All Act of 2017, which has the support of one-third of Senate Democrats.

Recently, Sanders, I-Vt., claimed that his bill would save more than $2 trillion over a 10-year period. According to the Associated Press, however, the senator “mischaracterized” the analysis upon which that estimate was based, a major study of the cost of the Sanders bill by Charles Blahous, a former Medicare trustee, now at the Mercatus Center.

As the Associated Press’ fact check notes, the $2.1 trillion “savings” estimate rests on the implausible assumption—studiously ignored by Sanders and others—that hospitals and staffing levels would remain the same—despite an estimated 40 percent reduction in compensation for medical services.

Such a massive pay cut would guarantee, says Blahous, that doctors and hospitals would get paid for services “substantially below” their costs of providing the services. Thus, he warns, “ … whether providers could sustain such losses and remain in operation, and how those who continue operations would adapt to such dramatic payment reductions, are critically important questions.”

Yes, they are. Blahous’ findings are particularly relevant for young men and women entering medical school. As Kaiser Health News recently reported, a growing contingent of young physicians and medical students favor expanding the power of government officials to control medicine, and thus their professional lives.

After all, most students become doctors more out of a desire to care for patients than to make a lot of money. Sanders’ proposed pay cut, however, would likely price many doctors out of independent practice, as well as decimate larger medical systems—neither of which would benefit patients.

Medicare would ostensibly be the model for Sanders’ national health insurance program. Beyond lower payment levels, Medicare is governed by tens of thousands of pages of rules, regulations, and guidelines.

The transactional or administrative costs that doctors and other medical professionals already incurred in compliance with these reams of red tape are real, though they do not show up on Medicare or Medicaid budget documents. That is one reason why Medicare’s official administrative costs are deceptively low; the government shifts a large share of administrative costs for medical professionals.

By 2030, America faces a physician shortage ranging from roughly 43,000 to 121,000, depending upon the assumptions. The crush of nonclinical administrative duties is today a leading cause of American physician burnout and accelerated retirements.

Ultimately, the Sanders bill, by reducing physician compensation while enlarging the power of Washington’s health care bureaucracy, would only make matters worse.

Young doctors—and anyone else considering government-run health care—should look at the performance of the British National Health Service.

In a candid Oct. 12, 1975 interview with the London Sunday Times, then-Labor Minister David Owen, conceded:

“The health service was launched on a fallacy. First, we were going to finance everything, cure the nation and then spending would drop. That fallacy has been exposed. Then there was a period when everybody thought the public could have whatever they needed on the health service- it was just a question of governmental will. Now we recognize that no country, even if they are prepared to pay the taxes, can supply everything.”

Today, the British National Health Service is plagued with long wait times, delayed procedures, and an overstressed medical workforce.

A cursory survey of recent British news sources reveals a worrying trend in the delayed delivery and deteriorating quality of National Health Service health care. While British tabloids can be sensational, with bleeding ledes on hospital problems, sober British analysts are concerned.

Last winter, a particularly virulent strain of influenza hit Britain. British hospital wards are often overcrowded, but the crush of flu patients exacerbated the system’s persistent and underlying problems—inadequate staffing and insufficient resources. The British Medical Association’s quarterly survey of physicians found that 82 percent of respondents felt their workplaces were understaffed.

One doctor described the situation this way to the British Medical Association: “I came on to shift yesterday afternoon and there were patients literally everywhere. The corridor into the hospital was so busy we couldn’t have got a cardiac arrest patient through it into the resuscitation room.” He added, “To say the staff was at the end of their tethers would be a complete understatement.”

National Health Service morale has been suffering, and British Medical Association surveys show that complaints about resources, understaffing, and perpetual physician vacancies have been constant.

Aggravated by the flu season, and budget constraints, the National Health Service canceled some 50,000 “non-urgent” surgeries. The problem is that the urgency for a particular patient’s surgery is, or should be a doctor’s clinical judgment. For example, surgery for a person to repair an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), for instance, may be delayed. But delaying an AAA repair is risking a rupture, and patients with a ruptured AAA have a 90 percent mortality rate.

By March 2018, British emergency departments reached new lows, leaving 15.4 percent of patients waiting over four hours before being seen. This was far short of the goal of less than 5 percent of patients forced to wait over four hours.

When considering only major emergency departments, classified as Type 1 in the National Health Service, the rate increased to 23.6 percent of patients waiting longer than four hours to be seen. The British Medical Journal reports that this is the worst performance since 2004 when these metrics were first tracked.

Outside of emergency departments, the number of British patients waiting 18 weeks or more for treatment increased by 35 percent, which was an increase of 128,575 patients from about 362,000 patients in 2017, to over 490,000 patients in 2018.

Additionally, by March 2018, 2,755 patients had waited over a year to be treated, compared to 1,528 patients in 2017. In England, the National Health Service also broke records by canceling over 25,000 surgeries at the last minute in the first quarter of 2018—this was the highest number of last-minute cancellations in 24 years. Remarkably, this was after the British authorities initiated a series of reforms that started in 2016.

The British, of course, are responsible for their system and its results. They will, or will not, undertake reforms to reduce long queues, delayed care, and the consequent harm to British patients.

It is naïve, however, to believe that Americans can avoid similar consequences—annual budget dramas, long waiting times, and scandalous care denials—by giving members of Congress and officials of the federal bureaucracy control over American health care.

And if you want to see how crazy “our” politicians are, one only has to look at New York State and the governor’s race. We have discussed weeks ago the estimation of how much Medicare for All will cost.

Cynthia Nixon on getting single-payer health care in New York: ‘Pass it and then figure out how to fund it’

Kaitlyn Schallhorn wrote about Ms. Cynthia Nixon’s pursuit in her quest to become New York’s next governor.  Cynthia Nixon has advocated for a single-payer health care system in the state – something studies have shown would be a costly endeavor.

The proposed New York Health Act(NYHA), which would establish universal health care for everyone in the state, including undocumented immigrants, would require the state’s tax revenue to increase by about 156 percent by 2022, according to a study by the RAND Corp. But it also found state spending on total health care under NYHA would be slightly lower – about 3 percent – by 2031 than under the current system.

Nixon recently told the New York Daily News editorial board she did not yet have a plan to pay for single-payer.

“Pass it and then figure out how to fund it,” Nixon said. What an ignoramus and I’m not sure who or what she is as she tells the media not to call her a lesbian, but instead label her a queer!!

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who Nixon is challenging in the Democratic primary next week, has said it should be up to the federal government to pass a universal health care system. During a debate between the two candidates last month, Cuomo said the NYHA was good “in theory,” but would cost more than New York’s annual budget to implement it “in the long-term,” according to the Albany Times Union.

‘SEX AND THE CITY’ STAR CYNTHIA NIXON COULD BE NEW YORK’S NEXT GOVERNOR: A LOOK AT HER POLITICAL ACTIVISM

Nixon, on the other hand, has said a single-payer system will save the state and New Yorkers money overall.

There is widespread disagreement over how much it would cost to implement a single-payer health care system. Supporters of the single-payer system say it would cut excessive administrative costs compared to those incurred by private insurers. But critics, including most Republicans, warn the savings would be less dramatic than expected – and the system would cost too much.

Joe White, president of the Council for Affordable Health Coverage, has estimated that with single-payer “costs and taxes will rise, or patient access will be severely diminished – turning America’s medical system into a third-world product.”

The Medicare-for-all bill proposed earlier this year by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was estimated to cost$32.6 trillion over 10 years by a Mercatus Center at George Mason University study and it is estimated that a single-payer health care system in New York will cost $155 billion dollars over 10 years or less.

ANDREW CUOMO, CYNTHIA NIXON ACCUSE EACH OTHER OF LYING, CORRUPTION IN HEATED PRIMARY DEBATE

The term “single-payer health care” denotes only one entity bears the financial responsibility of health care – the government. Under this system, the government would be solely responsible for covering health care costs.

“The basic idea of single-payer is to cover everybody with a single government program, and that program would basically cover all the doctors and hospitals,” Dr. Adam Gaffney, an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told Fox News.

As the Times Union reported, the NYHA has continuously been introduced by Democrats in the state Assembly every year since 1992 but has been unsuccessful in the Senate.

I believe that the dysfunction in our Congress will continue and may get worse as the Mid-Term elections get closer and they will get nothing done. What happens after the elections will be determined depending on whether the Democrats grab the majority in one or both the House and the Senate.

On forward to look closer at Medicare for All and other ideas for a single-payer health care system as we get closer to what a real future health care system will or could look like in the U.S.A.