Trump Was For Socialized Medicine Before He Was, Sort Of, Against It

In the Republican debate on Thursday, Brett Baier asked Donald Trump about his past statements on health care. "Now, 15 years ago, you called yourself a liberal on health care. You were for a single-payer system, a Canadian-style system. Why were you for that then and why aren't you for it now?"

Baier is right on the facts. In Trump's 2000 book The America We Deserve, he wrote that "The Canadian plan also helps Canadians live longer and healthier than America. ... We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing."

Trumps answer to Baier's question should trouble anyone who believes in free market health care reforms.

"As far as single payer, it works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland. It could have worked in a different age, which is the age you're talking about, here."

Really? Let's take these claims one at a time.

First, as IBD has frequently detailed, single payer doesn't work in Canada, unless you consider extreme wait times, and the fact that Canadians often come to the U.S. to get needed care, working. One study found that roughly 41,000 leave Canada in a given year for needed health care.

Patients in Scotland, too, suffer from chronic delays. The Sunday Herald, for example, reported earlier this year that "Scotland's health boards are seeing delays of at least three times the target (emergency room) waiting times of four hours — and one health board recorded a wait of over 24 hours."

If you have cancer, Scotland's single payer definitely doesn't work "incredibly well." As Forbes Avik Roy points out, cancer survival rates in the U.S. are 40% higher than in Scotland.

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