Super Trumpista Mitch McConnell wants to dump Obama Care. Bad. Job One? Figure out why Canadians pay 51% less than we do and live three years longer. That’s great price-performance! We just get the price …
McConnell knows that Canadians are smacking us hard. Our health care expenses, he can tell you, have grown 2.1X as fast as theirs over the last twenty years. Yet, for the last forty years our life expectancy has been falling farther behind.
Canadian price-performance says that we are blowing an extra $1.3 trillion every year--a number that gets higher every year--only so we can have ever shorter lives than our northern neighbors? That's 2.2X our military budget!! 2.4X our total Medicaid spending!! And 2X what we spend on Medicare.
We are hosers, eh.
(In Trumplish that translates rather loosly into “losers bigly.” But, not even Don’s Billy Bush rant has a translation for Canada’s somewhat indelicate application of a hose to a specific part of the human anatomy. Or what happens when it is turned on...)
The bottom line? Businesses the world over can count on the health stability of the Canadian labor market. Canadians get a competitive edge that isn’t an option for American companies. American companies invest in Canada just to take advantage of Canadian healthcare price-performance.
What will McConnell do to guarantee American business -- see Publius on American Business Needs Four Guarantees -- that the labor force from which we must hire is the healthiest in the world? How will we beat Canada? For us to survive and prosper in the Information Age we have to be able to do this. No "ifs", "ands" or "buts".
Or, will McConnell engineer the healthcare equivalent of Crysler’s Farm. From which, he knows, it took the U.S. another three decades to recover. (Sorry about that Mexico!!)
You would think that the managers of the Trumpista Axis like McConnell could count well enough to beat Canada, even though we have known since February 2016 that Don Trump himself cannot count. (See Publius on Don Trump Learns To Count.)
McConnell and his fellow top Trumptista Paul Ryan count so poorly that they are flailing atop a hung Congress. Their three-party coalition is so deeply divided (See Publius on Our Constitutional Crisis and Our Four Party System) that the Democrats need do nothing but watch the governing coalition implode over and over.
The only thing saving the Trumpistas now is that the Obama Boom (see Publius on Obama The Great) is still rolling along after eight years. Without Obama, they’d be toast.
Policy question number one for Super Trumpitsa McConnell: what do we have to do to reverse our fast-failing position, beat Canadians on healthcare price-performance and assure that our industry is on top of the world?
Personal question for Mitch McConnell. Why don’t you get it? Is it a small problem with counting? Your schooling not up to snuff but you don’t want to talk about it? A little embarrassing perhaps?
Ok Mitch! This is YOUR day! Turn to the cameras, smile and say, “Eh Canada! Happy 150th!“
Follow Up August 3, 2017
Today, Bloomberg jumped on Publius' bandwagon. Laurie Meisler penned a great piece on the excess Americans spend on health care. But she failed to mention just what this means to us, like that the excess is 2.2X our military budget. And that we could cut all Medicaid and Medicare plus another $190 billion and still not best Canada in price performance. She also did not mention what this costs us in global competitiveness.