Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar sounded the alarm about Democrat promises of Medicare-for-all on the campaign trail on Thursday.
“The threat is an immediate and complete takeover of healthcare,” Azar said during the Conservative Political Action Conference outside of Washington, DC.
Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta and Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon joined Azar on the panel led by Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute.
Azar said that the new Democratic health care plan would dramatically crash the insurance industry in ways that President Barack Obama never dared to do politically.
“They promised you that you could keep your insurance if you liked it,” he said. “This time they are not promising that.”
Azar jokingly praised Democrats for finally admitting that a one-size fits all government health care plan was their ultimate goal. But he got more serious when explaining the impact it would have on seniors in Medicare.
“It’s going to violate the commitment that we have made to our seniors in the Medicare program,” he said.
He warned that once all Americans were shifted into Medicare, the best doctors and the best hospitals would leave the program and only serve customers able to pay outside of the government system.
“We do not need this in our system, this is not the problem that needs to be solved in America today,” he said.
The panel of officials praised Congress and President Donald Trump for finally repealing the health care mandate but cited additional steps that the administration had taken to expand short-term health care plans and associate health care plans to provide more choice in the health insurance market and bring prices down.
“As conservatives, we can say that markets work,” Acosta said.
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