This is radical. Also evil.
This does seem radical. Then again, at the moment the way it works is that sick illegal immigrants do nothing until things are so bad that they have to go to the ER. The ER then treats them (along with all of the uninsured citizens who can't afford preventative medicine either) and then passes the bill along to the rest of us. Since ER visits are the most expensive options that's a bit cost for us to absorb. That's part of the reason that we spend $10,739 per person on annual healthcare (back in 2017, so I'm sure it's more now).
It's really easy to sneer at the people making suggestions and talk about how stupid and radical they are. It's harder to come up with suggestions to fix a badly broken system. So what should we do?
I'm not sure that an idea can really be seen as "radical" if it has
majority support, or if it's been successfully implemented in every other developed nation on the planet. As far as taxes needing to be raised, that's true, but it would be offset by American workers and employers no longer needing to pay gigantic healthcare premiums with five thousand dollar deductibles.
This is a Republican pundit's description of a Democratic proposal. I could provide you with a Democratic pundit's counterpoint, but there's not much point.
We live in a time when higher education is both a requirement for our workforce and an an unmanageable expense for many of our young people. Many of our young people are crippled by college debt and therefore cannot fully participate in the economy. Other young people are stuck in poverty because they cannot afford higher education. That's bad for us all. Furthermore, many of our companies are saying that they can't find qualified workers, and that they need to import them on H1B visas. That's bad for American workers. That's a problem.
The Democratic proposal - generally speaking, as there are actually a variety of proposals - is to make public colleges free to qualified applicants as an investment in our workforce and the future of our country. Now, I think that we can all agree that the problem I outlined above is both real and a problem. Unfortunately, the GOP response to the Democratic proposal is to call liberals idiot socialists. Their counterproposal, as far as I can tell, has yet to be drafted.
An honest Republican - a Republican who gave a [poop] about our country - might reply with a counter proposal. That Republican might say, for example, that free education makes a lot of sense in certain situations, but not in all cases. They might insist that it be limited to kids who passed rigorous entrance exams, majored in high-need subjects, and maintained a 3.0 GPA. They might push back against free baccalaureate programs, but go in on free community college programs geared toward earning kids certificates in high demand fields. They might offer tax credits to companies that worked with community colleges to train up American workers, rather than importing labor from Asia. They might try to come up with a
[love] solution to a huge, glaringly obvious problem.
Or they could scream about radical socialism...
