NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker got the radical socialist running for one of Michigan’s senate seats to admit what anybody with sense could deduce about the “Medicare-for-All” scam: Everyone will have to pay for it.
Welker pressed Michigan socialist candidate Abdul El-Sayed on his pie-in-the-sky proposal for universal healthcare during the August 9 edition of NBC’s Meet the Press. “Many Americans worry though you can only make Medicare free and universal if you increase taxes. So if you are elected and make this push would you need to increase taxes?”
Sayed initially tried to rearrange the issue to target the typical bourgeoisie bogeyman of the Marxist doctrine: “As I’ve said across this campaign, I am for taxing billionaires and their wealth.” This had nothing to do with Welker’s question, of course, and Welker surprisingly called him out for it.
“What about people who make less than $1 billion and less than $1 million though, Dr. El-Sayed,” Welker cross-examined. El-Sayed tried beating around the bush but eventually committed the politically fatal mistake of saying the quiet part out loud about who the actual targeted tax base will be: “So for the average person — and if you look at your W-2, if you’re an employee that gets paid every two weeks or four weeks — after you pay your taxes, the next biggest check that comes off the top of your pay stub is to your health insurance company.”
Then came the kicker: Instead of paying the health insurance company from your bi-weekly or monthly pay stubs, why not just pay more in taxes to the federal government?! No, we’re not kidding. This is literally the crux of El-Sayed’s entire barking mad proposal: “There’s an opportunity here, I think, to trade what we give to a big corporation who gets to decide who we get to see and who we don’t, for a little bit more paid into FICA.” Translation: Give us more of your taxes and we promise we’ll take care of you? The dregs of the disastrous Social Security system are rearing their putrid heads. But socialists think their motives are pure, unlike greedy corporations.
Abdul El-Sayed admits that Medicare-for-all involves raising the taxes on all Americans regardless of their income level and ending private health insurance:
"Instead of paying your health insurance company, you pay a little more in taxes... I think that's a trade that's worth… pic.twitter.com/o1qbxyeOnU— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 9, 2026
The brain hurt implicit in El-Sayed’s attempt to juxtapose paying more in taxes while still selling the whole schtick as a “free” lunch was unreal:
Imagine instead of paying that to your health insurance company whose CEO makes $20 million a year — instead you pay a little bit more in taxes for healthcare that you wouldn’t lose if you lost your job, or turned 26, or got married or got divorced. I think all of us would be a lot more interested in that kind of a system if we knew that our healthcare would be free at the point of care and be free without having to worry about losing it in general.
News flash: The government can’t create resources out of thin air. The math isn’t mathing, El-Sayed! First, his attempt to pin the cost on billionaires is a common selling point for leftists. The Washington Post editorial board analyzed in July that “Billionaires don't have enough money to foot the bill” for a Medicare-for-All utopia. The reality, as The Post conceded then, was that “Medicare-for-all would require raising taxes on most taxpayers, including the middle class.” This explains El-Sayed’s pussyfooting around the truth that the “freebie” snake oil he was selling has a hefty price.
Let’s examine some figures shall we? Mercatus Center senior research strategist Charles Blahous released a study July 2018 estimating then that a Medicare-for-All structure would place “unprecedented strain” on taxpayers by adding a daunting $32.6 trillion “to federal budget commitments during the first 10 years of its implementation,” and that’s just the "conservative" estimate from eight years ago not accounting for the enormous inflationary pressures consumers faced since then under the Biden administration between 2021-2024. But the unpleasant realities Blahous highlighted still remain:
M4A would markedly increase the demand for healthcare services while simultaneously cutting payments to providers by more than 40 percent relative to private insurance rates, reducing payments to levels that are lower on average than providers’ current costs of providing care. It cannot be known how much providers will react to these losses by reducing the availability of existing health services, the quality of such services, or both.
Kudos to Welker for finally doing some journalisming and getting the socialist to admit the obvious.
