Ilhan Omar Thinks Socialized Medicine Can Fight Coronavirus – Ignores Fact Coronavirus Is from Socialized Medicine Country

How inadequate is it? Let Wee describe it for you in the story’s first few graphs:

“Well before dawn, nearly a hundred people stood in line outside one of the capital’s top hospitals,” she wrote.

“They were hoping to get an appointment with a specialist, a chance for access to the best health care in the country. Scalpers hawked medical visits for a fee, ignoring repeated crackdowns by the government.

“A Beijing resident in line was trying to get his father in to see a neurologist. A senior lawmaker from Liaoning, a northeastern province, needed a second opinion on her daughter’s blood disorder.

“Mao Ning, who was helping her friend get an appointment with a dermatologist, arrived at 4 a.m. She was in the middle of the line.”

It’s worth noting that China’s system isn’t fully socialized, although they’re headed there. It’s a patchwork of overstretched public care and private institutions that try (and fail) to plug the holes.

The country is actually re-socializing its health care after free market reforms in 1984.

Of course, as of Saturday morning, China had 80,652 people infected and 3,070 dead. Granted, it was where the virus started, but the next closest nation, South Korea, had just 7,041 confirmed cases and 48 deaths.

I’m fully aware this isn’t necessarily a compelling argument that socialized medicine is responsible for a pandemic.

On the other hand, it’s compelling enough to beat a tossed-off line about how “Medicare for All” is a great way to fight pandemics.

There’s something truly head-scratching about Omar’s tweet, as if it was just something that entered her head while she was in traffic and she thought to herself, “Yeah, that’s worth tweeting.”

There’s no evidence to back this up. There’s nothing anyone can hold up to say that our system, patchwork though it may be, is doing worse when it comes to coronavirus than any state-run system, including China’s.

There’s nothing that says a theoretically private system here — with more innovation, less red tape, fully transparent pricing and actual competition — would do worse than “Medicare for All.”

This is to say nothing of the fact that Omar is currently attacking the governments for its response to coronavirus yet wants government to take over all of our health care, presumably under the premise that people who believe like her will always be running it.

There’ll hopefully be an answer to coronavirus sometime in the near future.

My guess is that the answer will be waiting this out and hoping that the fear-mongering is just that.

The answer, however, isn’t socialized medicine.

Omar’s tweet is yet another example of a Democrat using coronavirus as a political bludgeon, another sad attempt by a politician to convince the American electorate that if you only let them order things, everything would fall into place.

Two seconds of thought, however, and this tossed-off clapback dissolves like a wet tissue.

Story cited here.

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