Obama Comes Clean on His Support for Government Health Care

Dr. Merrill Matthews Institute for Policy Innovation. President Barack Obamas career has always depended on an adoring left and a complicit media neither of which will make a big deal of his inaccuracies and flip-flops. We saw it on his same-sex marriage switcheroo; now were seeing it on his recent support for government-run health care misleadingly referred to as Medicare for allMedicaid for all or better yet VA for all would be more accurate. In his recent University of Illinois speech Obama said So Democrats arent running on good old ideas like a higher minimum wage theyre running on good new ideas like Medicare for all. So Medicare for all is a good new idea even though President Harry Truman supported a similar idea in the late 1940s and many liberals pushed for it when Congress passed Medicare for seniors in 1965. Both Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton unsuccessfully tried to pass a major expansion of government in health care. And former Rep. John Conyers first introduced his Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act in 2003. Also in 2003six years before he became presidentin a speech to the AFL-CIO Obama said I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan. So Obama considers an idea Democrats have been pushing for 65 years and Obama himself has supported for more than 15 years a good new idea. But thats only his recent stance. Like the issue of same-sex marriage Obamas flippedtwice. As Zeke J. Miller wrote in Time magazine in 2015 Obama claimed he supported gay marriage when he ran for an Illinois state Senate seat in 1996. But when he was running for president in 2008 he said I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Then in 2012 he was back in favor of same-sex marriage explaining he had evolved. Well hes evolved againon health care. After extolling himself a single-payer advocate in 2003 he claimed in March 2010 as he was trying to push through Obamacare that while other countries had government-run health care systems in America it would be neither practical nor realistic. Apparently its both practical and realistic now probably because Obamacare has been such an utter failure. The complicit mainstream media will not hold him accountable for the way he and Democrats undermined the health insurance system nor for his flip-flops. (At least the Washington Post identified some of those flip-flops in 2008.) Had the media a shred of integrity they would press Obama and Democrats on why given their dismal track record reforming health care anyone should trust their claim that Medicare for all will finally fix a health care system they broke. Todays PolicyByte was written by Dr. Merrill Matthews resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation.