How Can Grown-Ass Adults Vote For A Candidate With A 5-Year-Old's Grasp Of Math?
I would love "free" healthcare. I would likewise love a "free" flying car and a "free" mansion in Beverly Hills (though I would take Bel-Air if there's a stable and a helipad).

This thought came about because of a wee back and forth Karol Markowicz and I had on Twitter:

Not surprisingly, many panties were bunched, and some Bernie girl (campaigning for him in New York, I think) told people to come after me, also assuming I was a Republican (and calling me that).

Um, I'm a libertarian who can do rudimentary math.

Bernie, on the other hand, has a 5-year-old's grasp of math: "For California alone, single-payer health care would cost about $400 billion a year--more than twice the state's annual budget."

That's from a Nick Gillespie piece at Reason on why "Medicare for All" is a really bad idea. More:

For starters, there is the cost problem:

For California alone, single-payer health care would cost about $400 billion a year--more than twice the state's annual budget. Nationwide "Medicare for all" would cost more than $32 trillion over its first decade. Doubling federal income and corporate taxes wouldn't be enough to pay for it. No doubt, that cost would be used to justify further restrictions on health-care access.

In 2017, Eric Boehm noted at Reason that a single-payer bill passed by New York's state assembly would cost $173 billion annually (the state generates about $71 billion a year in revenue). Even when you factor in savings from people not having to pay insurance premiums and co-payments, there's just no way to raise the revenue on such plans. In 2014, Boehm writes, Vermont had to throw in the towel because it "would have required an extra $2.5 billion annually, almost double the state's current budget, and would have required an 11.5 percent payroll tax increase and a 9 percent income tax increase."

But cost isn't the only problem. Atlas writes that in Great Britain, "a record 4.2 million patients were on England's [National Health Service] waiting lists." And there's this:

In Canada last year, the median wait time between seeing a general practitioner and following up with a specialist was 10.2 weeks, while the wait between seeing a doctor and beginning treatment was about five months. According to a Fraser Institute study, the average Canadian waits three months to see an ophthalmologist, four months for an orthopedist and five months for a neurosurgeon.

In contrast, wait lists are not a major concern in the United States.

People have these blithe ideas about government-provided healthcare. VA anyone? Just the stories I hear from people who call in at my volunteer mediator gig are enough to tell me that's a horrible idea.

And then there's my personal experience with government all up in healthcare:

Obamacare ruined my previously affordable care thanks to a California clusterfuck where you can't get the ACA prices unless you have a certain amount of money left at the end of the year. (I have less than that at the moment, thanks to the decline in newspapers and writerpay.) I thought I could just choose to pay more than I would owe for ACA plans, but they don't let you have choice. Government chooses that unchoice for you!

It gets better: You can't get Medi-Cal (free care, which I never wanted) unless you don't have care -- meaning I would have to cut off my healthcare and the doctors and drug I fought a big battle to get and get covered in order to possibly get Medi-Cal and possibly get turned down for it. This would likely mean losing access to this drug, which I need, along with the Adderall I'm prescribed so I can focus and write. Not a doable situation.

So...while living on half a shoestring, I'm forced to pay the monthly price millionaires pay while...not even having enough after expenses to make the cutoff for Obamacare! So, I still have health care (in case I am hit by a bus or get cancer, and to get some medicines I take), but I otherwise can't afford to use it.

Sound good, deluded Bernie-loving children? Hop on!