A Republican member of Congress said something epically stupid the other day.
No, I’m not talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s warning about Nancy Pelosi’s “gazpacho police.” If you ask me, Greene was performing a public service; we all need some good laughs, especially given the demise of the borscht belt.
I’m talking, instead, about Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who tweeted out a novel argument against universal health care: “Over 70% of Americans who died with COVID, died on Medicare, and some people want #MedicareForAll?”
To belabor a point that should be obvious, Medicare recipients have been especially vulnerable to COVID because they generally suffer from a serious preexisting condition: advanced age.
Maybe Massie should have looked instead at Canada, which has single-payer health insurance for everyone – it’s even called Canadian Medicare. Canada, as it happens, has had only about one-third as many COVID deaths per capita as we have. More generally, Canadians can expect, on average, to live almost 4 1/2 years longer than Americans, even though health care spending per person is only about half as high as in the U.S.