Apparently, "following the science" means embracing socialism. So argues Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing Democrat running for Senate in Michigan.
"Once you train in the sciences, you don't leave that scientific approach to thinking and that rigor of thinking. And I try to bring that to policy problems," Mr. El-Sayed, who has a medical degree but has never practiced as a physician, told Scientific American. "You construct a hypothesis of the world and you test it . . . and then you'll study the outcome of the intervention to see if it works."
A drug maker would scrap an experimental medicine that fails to help patients and causes severe adverse effects. Mr. El-Sayed and his fellow Democrats want to rerun failed policy experiments at a higher dosage.
Consider taxes. Most European countries that have imposed wealth taxes -- including Austria, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and France -- repealed them because they prompted high earners to flee. Before France's repeal in 2018, a net 580 households subject to the tax left each year on average. After repeal, many returned.
Progressives claim the wealthy are impervious to higher taxes. So why has a stream of Cessnas vamoosed from California, New York and New Jersey to zero-income tax Florida, Texas and Nevada?
A 2013 study of European soccer players found countries with lower tax rates attracted the most talented foreign players. Irony alert: One of the study's authors was left-wing economist Emmanuel Saez, an architect of a California wealth tax ballot measure, who advocates drowning the rich to pay for cradle-to-grave states. Democrats are on board.
Mr. Sayed has endorsed a wealth tax on billionaires and even those with smaller fortunes. He also wants to tax capital gains above $1 million at the same rate as ordinary income, remove the $184,500 income cap on the 12.4% Social Security payroll tax and boost the top marginal personal income-tax rate (now 37%), though he doesn't specify how high.
Such ideas are mainstream in the Democratic Party. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker has proposed raising the top income-tax rate to 43%. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen bids 49%. Uncapping the Social Security tax would boost the marginal tax rate for higher earners by another 12.4%, putting the total top federal rate in the neighborhood of 60%.
Throw in state taxes, and the wealthy in some states would be paying north of 70% of their income to the government. The top rates in the U.K. (45%), Germany (47.5%) and France (55.4%) would be a relative bargain. Watch as professional basketball players jump to European leagues.
Soaking the rich hasn't solved the fiscal problems of European welfare states. Instead, it has stunted economic growth and, in turn, tax revenue, resulting in a lower standard of living and shoddy public services.
Witness the recent student-led protests in France over the rickety infrastructure in public schools. Its national healthcare system is similarly dilapidated. Seniors may not have the energy to take to the streets because their hips are failing and the government won't pay for a replacement. They're going to die soon anyway, so why spend the money? Better to spend it on subsidizing idle young people -- France's youth unemployment rate tops 20% -- who can't find jobs because of stultifying taxes, regulations and labor rules.
Mr. El-Sayed and his socialist compatriots present "Medicare for all" -- a euphemism for a single-payer system -- as a healthcare nirvana. The Democratic candidate's idealized system has no copays, deductibles, premiums or provider network. It promises free healthcare on demand from any doctor. Such a system doesn't exist anywhere in the world.
Medicare requires premiums, co-pays and deductibles, and as Mr. El-Sayed acknowledged, "as it operates right now, there is some subcontracting to private companies." About half of Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in privately administered Advantage plans, which are less expensive than traditional fee-for-service because insurers do a better job than the government of controlling waste and fraud. Democrats want to eliminate the Advantage program and move entirely to a fee-for-service system. If you like your Medicare plan, don't expect to keep it.
Most countries fund their government-run systems with payroll and value-added taxes, so that people pay for healthcare by having less disposable income. And by enduring delays. Government-run health systems are inefficient and stingy. Result: longer waits for appointments with procedures, if rationing bodies will even approve them.
About 17% of patients in the U.S. wait more than two months for an appointment with a specialist, which is significantly less than in socialized-medicine utopias like Canada (48%), France (45%) and the U.K. (43%). Government-run healthcare means less access, not more.
Democrats are unlikely to ban private insurance in the short term, if only because this would be unpopular with unions that have Cadillac plans. The bigger danger is they muck up private insurance with more regulation as they try to fix the unintended effects of their disastrous ObamaCare experiment.
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