Stop the presses: ladies and gents, Mark Warner, the once self-styled “radical centrist,” is now on the side of the likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC in support of universal healthcare.
“It’s become obvious…in order to have a sustainable system, we have to have universal healthcare, so that we don’t focus only on coverage, we can focus on bringing costs down,” Warner wrote in response to a question on a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” on Thursday.
The questioner noted the obvious:
“You have previously voiced your opposition to single-payer healthcare and were reluctant to even endorse a public option. Have your positions changed now that healthcare prices are exceedingly unaffordable and require dramatically more subsidies to stay viable?”
I’m not going to be cynical and suggest that Warner is coming around simply because he just announced that he’s running for re-election to the U.S. Senate in the 2026 cycle, and polls over the past year have as many as two-thirds of us supporting a Medicare for All system.
Warner is a business guy – made his millions in the tech sector.
My net worth isn’t $250 million or anything, but it’s always seemed to me that universal healthcare makes us more competitive economically in the global marketplace.
I’m sure Mark Warner knows this a million times better than I do.
We’re literally the only industrialized nation where business and industry is expected to bear the cost of health insurance as a benefit to employees, and by running a system where the provision of healthcare is expected to turn profits for not only providers, but also the middlemen – in the form of insurers – we pay more, and end up getting less.
ICYMI
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Per data from Peterson-KFF, healthcare spending in the U.S. was more than double, per capita, what is spent in countries like Japan and the UK, and 38.6 percent per capita more than the country with the second-highest spending per capita, Switzerland.
This, as we’ve been told for 75 years that doing universal healthcare would cost us more.
News flash: it’s always been about profits.
And for our much-higher rate of expenditure, we have lower life expectancy (4.1 years fewer than peer countries with universal healthcare); more than double the rates of congestive heart failure and diabates; and dramatically higher infant mortality rates (52.5 percent higher than the country with the second-highest rate, Canada; more than 500 percent higher rates than Sweden, Austria and Switzerland).
This is embarrassing.
More embarrassing is that Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans have been promising for the past 10 years to give us the concepts of a plan to deal with all of this, and all we’ve got so far is Trump saying he wants to give people money directly so that they can buy their own health insurance, as if that does anything to address the root cause of the problem.
Hey, we got the radical centrist to say he’s for universal healthcare.
This registers on the Richter scale.
“I’m seriously looking into solutions that are actually working around the world, and I’m intrigued with what Australia and Germany have done. You couldn’t create a more opaque system than the one in the U.S. No one pays more for less than we do,” Warner wrote in the Reddit AMA.
From his fingers to God’s ears.
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Chris Graham
