3. For far too many voters, single-payer isn’t such a bad idea after all. An Economist/YouGov poll recently asked used voters if they favored the Democrats’ preferred euphemism for Soviet-style single payer health care (a.k.a. “Medicare for all”) the results were not encouraging. The poll found that nearly a majority (48 percent) of Republicans supported the idea.
The exit polls from the 2016 election weren’t reassuring either. As I’ve written elsewhere, even though 47 percent of voters thought Obamacare went too far, 48 percent though it was either “just about right” (18 percent) or “didn’t go far enough” (30 percent).
What do these three trends and data points mean for Republicans? The costs of inaction could be very high, even catastrophic — losing power and ushering in the single-payer system the Left has long dreamed of. A “bad bill” that was only marginally better than the status quo would be a far better outcome than doing nothing. There is no scenario in which voters will blame the party out of power for the incompetence of the party currently in power.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member