Crosstalk: March 15, 2019

Twila Brase is the president and co-founder of Citizens Council for Health Freedom, an organization that exists to secure health freedom for all and protect health care choices, individualized patient care and medical and genetic privacy rights. Twila is a certified public health nurse and is daily speaker on the Health Freedom Minute. She is author of ‘Big Brother in the Exam Room: The Dangerous Truth About Electronic Health Records.’

This Crosstalk centered around discussion of Medicare for All (HR-1384). What is it? Twila described it by noting what the bill does. The bill itself begins by saying, ‘There is hereby established a national health insurance program to provide comprehensive protection against the cost of health care and health related services in accordance with the standards specified in or established under this act.’

Twila disagrees that this is a health insurance program because insurance is something that you purchase from the private market. It’s not what the government does. Instead, what the government does is give you a program which is an entitlement. She feels this is just another way for the government to deceive the American public.

What about the comprehensive protection? Who decides what comprehensive is and how is that parsed out? So if people of certain ages and certain conditions don’t have access to certain care, it’s only comprehensive to the degree that they allow it to be. In other words, it’s not comprehensive regarding everything that may be wrong with you. Instead, it’s protection against the cost of care and related services but only as they define these categories in the rest of the bill.

Twila calls this bill a ‘pipe dream.’ She uses that term because it promises universal coverage, freedom of choice, nondiscrimination comprehensive benefits, no cost sharing whatsoever, no deductibles and no premiums so it’s going to be free!

Obviously it can’t be free, nor can it be all of those things that have been promised because the government will control it, and those individuals you depend on to give you care (hospitals, doctors, clinics, etc.) need to be paid sufficiently. If they aren’t, they’ll go away.

So again, Twila sees this as a ‘pipe dream’ because it will cost 32 trillion over 4 years. She wondered how much of that will go to ‘bureaucracy’ verses how much will be left over for the care of patients. Then there’s the remainder of the economy and other things we might want to fund as a nation such as national defense.

Twila offers much more on this subject and Crosstalk listeners provide their input as well.