New York Magazine: Kamala Harris Health Care Policy ‘Makes No Sense’

New York Magazine has attempted to decipher the various flip-flops by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) on health care policy and concluded that they make “no sense.”

As Breitbart News has noted, Harris has seemed to change her mind several times about whether her plan would eliminate private health insurance. Harris is a co-sponsor of the “Medicare for All” bill introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), which effectively eliminates all private health insurance. It leaves space for health care that is not “duplicative” of treatment that is offered by the state-run plan, but that space is so narrow as to make private health insurance all but impossible to sell, or to buy — something that Sanders has celebrated.

Sanders has also proudly admitted that his plan would require tax hikes on the middle class, though he argues that middle class families would experience a net benefit through lower health care costs. Harris says she would not raise taxes to pay for her plan.

In an article by Eric Levitz, the magazine explores Harris’s version of “Medicare for All,” and observes that not only is it confused about whether those with private health insurance will continue to enjoy it, but it also calls for massive new spending while also promising a middle-class tax cut:

If you took Harris at her word, her legislative plan for 2021 would be to first pass a law massively cutting middle-class taxes, and then pass a second law radically increasing them.

The fundamental incoherence of Harris’s agenda went largely ignored over the first seven months of her campaign.

…

But the substantive absurdity of Harris’s health-care position is less puzzling than its political incoherence. It would be one thing for Harris to cynically embrace the popular aspects of Medicare for All, while disavowing the unpopular provisions that make those goodies possible. She wouldn’t be the first presidential candidate to campaign on a beautiful lie. But that isn’t what she’s doing. Rather, she is effectively taking ownership of an unpopular, peripheral feature of Sanders’s plan (the elimination of duplicative private insurance), while disavowing an unpopular provision that is fundamental to his vision for single-payer (broad-based tax increases to replace private-insurance premiums).

There is no political logic to occupying this patch of middle ground.

Read the full article here.

Harris also told comedian Jimmy Kimmel on his television show Wednesday evening that “you can keep your doctor” under her plan:

Former vice president made a similar promise to seniors on Monday. Both are repeating a promise infamously broken by President Barack Obama.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.