Kamala Harris’ worst plan yet: bringing the NHS to America

Democratic politicians seemed determined to drag American healthcare into a statist quagmire

Is private health care returning to Britain? Labour’s reform plan for the National Health Service attempted to suggest as much. Keir Starmer quixotically promised that Labour will deliver some two million more appointments, scans, and procedures annually with the help of the private sector.
Something, of course, must be done. Less than one in four people are satisfied with the NHS and its outdated centralised system of universal coverage, which routinely fails to provide adequate services. Some 7.6 million patients, including individuals suffering from cancer, are waiting to start treatment. About half have waited more than four months. Many have anguished for over a year.
Despite these problems, across the Atlantic US politicians have been dreaming of importing this deeply flawed system under the banner of “Medicare for All.” As the British people increasingly turn towards the private sector to address obvious government failure, the United States has begun moving in the opposite direction.
The irony seems lost on Kamala Harris and her allies, who have long wanted to implement single-payer health care in the United States. When she was a senator, Harris co-sponsored legislation introduced by self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, a long-time advocate of Medicare for All, which would have abolished private health insurance and forced everyone into a single government-run health plan.
The United States is already falling down the slippery slope towards single-payer health care. Its Medicaid program, established to provide health coverage for the poorest Americans, has ballooned in recent years to insure more than 80 million people. It now covers able-bodied adults with incomes up to 138 per cent of the federal poverty line – over $43,000 for a family of four – in 40 of the 50 states.
In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration enacted legislation capping a person’s insurance premium at 8.5 per cent of income, no matter how much money they make. The cap slides down to a lower percentage as income declines below 400 per cent of poverty, or $124,800 for a family of four. Individuals earning up to 150 per cent of the federal poverty line can acquire premium-free coverage.
If elected, Harris would doubtless try to extend taxpayer-funded Medicaid coverage to able-bodied adults in the ten states that have refused to do so – and make the 2022 scheme for subsidising insurance coverage permanent.
These moves would nudge the United States toward Harris’s old vision of “Medicare for All.” In addition to expanding government health coverage to everyone, not just the elderly as under the status quo, Harris explicitly supports giving taxpayer-funded coverage to those living in America illegally.
The showpiece of her administration’s deviously named 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was another recent lunge towards centrally managed health care. The law enabled the government to set prices it will pay drug makers for certain medicines covered by Medicare starting in 2026 – similar to processes in place in Britain. Democrats recently celebrated the announcement of the first round of government price controls under the law.
It’s curious that the US Left trudges forward to replicate a system considered “broken” by Britain’s own Health Secretary. American Democrats largely rely on emotional appeals to justify an NHS-style model in the States. “Medicare for All” might sound like a compassionate and progressive agenda. But a close look at Britain’s state of affairs reveals nothing comforting.
Nearly 300 people die per week in Britain due directly to the inability of the NHS to provide timely emergency care, according to the Royal College of Emergency Care. Heart attack victims face 90-minute average wait times for an ambulance.
That’s the real human toll of single-payer health care. These government-run systems cannot function properly because they can’t respond flexibly to patient needs. Slow bureaucracies, government limits on NHS spending, layers of authorisation, and endless patient queues are a far cry from the service the private sector provides across most sectors of the economy.
Making a service “free” and “universal” doesn’t ensure its availability. The private sector’s efficiency and quality of services are increasingly viewed as a life raft in a desperate situation, with some prepared to admit that the NHS structure is inherently unsustainable.
If they took the time to look, Kamala Harris and like-minded Democrats might be able to learn valuable lessons from their counterparts in London.
Sally C. Pipes is President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute