The Chicago Tribunes story about Baucus coming out for single payer begins rather dramatically with a retelling of how he once kicked single-payer supporters out of an Obamacare hearing. This is meant to give you the impression that Baucus has changed with the times and come around to a new point of view.
Nope.
This is what they wanted all along. This was always the goal. What “this” am I referring to?
It’s time for America to consider seriously a single-payer, government-run health system, says Max Baucus, Montana’s longest serving U.S. senator, former ambassador to China and one of the chief architects of Obamacare.
“My personal view is we’ve got to start looking at single-payer,” Baucus said Thursday night at Montana State University. “I think we should have hearings…. We’re getting there. It’s going to happen.”
The only reason Max and friends were hard single payer supporters is they were giving the game away too early. He wanted them to shut up and stop ruining the ruse so they could try to sucker in Republicans to vote for Obamacare, and so they could get the American public to go along. The press is going to keep treating it like a big personal philosophic shift …
Max Baucus, once a foe of single-payer health care, belatedly endorses it https://t.co/0XlvUYbda4 pic.twitter.com/Y9FCAakrWU
— Barbara Gorder (@Gorder) September 9, 2017
But it was always going to lead here. Supporting single payer was always the plan. And now they’re ready to start advocating for it. They’ll say nothing else works, that Obamcare was a great effort but can’t get past the “red tape” and “republican hate” and that fully socialized medicine is the only resort left.
Back then, Baucus said, he felt adamantly that Congress wouldn’t pass a government-run system like Canada’s. So it was the one alternative he refused to put “on the table” for consideration.
But you can see the difference, Baucus said, when you visit hospitals on either side of the border. In Montana, half a rural hospital will be dedicated to processing medical insurance claims. In Canada, he said, just one small room is needed to verify that patients are residents.
And Americans pay much higher drug prices, he said, because the government can’t negotiate better prices with the drug industry, so U.S. patients end up subsidizing drug prices for the rest of the world.
Now President Donald Trump’s administration and Republicans in Congress are trying to undermine Obamacare so it will collapse, he said. “I think it’s tragic.”
See?
And in the end, Trump will probably go along with them. Because it’s what he wants, too.
It’s coming. Max is the canary.