Good to know just as Dem Senators are frantically shoving each other out of the way to climb aboard Bernie's single payer socialized medicine train.
A video from 1987 shows Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) said Medicaid for every American "would bankrupt the nation" while he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in a clip posted by the NTK Network.
"You want to guarantee that all people have access to health care as you do in Canada," Sanders said.
"But I think what we understand is that unless we change the funding system and the control mechanism in this country to do that—for example, if we expanded Medicaid [to] everybody," Sanders added. "Give everybody a Medicaid card—we would be spending such an astronomical sum of money that, you know, we would bankrupt the nation."
You don't say.
But if we learned anything from the campaign, it's that Bernie is very bad at math and pays very little attention to details. Also bankrupting America was something that we last worried about in the 80s. Or maybe the 90s. In the 21st century, we've bodly embraced a strategy of "investing in the future" by piling on lots of debt. So why not "invest" in universal health care?
California is trying to do it. Vermont tried it. There's no money for it, but why let that stop us?
Still we should pause to consider that a 1987 Socialist was less radical than today's respectable Dem senators. That's how extreme the Democrats have become.