My shoulder waited three years. The VA pushed my surgery back three years, and Bernie Sanders wants to put your mother and your kids on a bigger version of that exact government line.
Class is in session. Phones in the bin.
Every time somebody on the left brings up single-payer health care, they finish with the same line. “The right has no alternative. All you do is complain.” They say it on cable. They say it in my replies. They say it like it is a settled lab result.
It is a talking point with the citation missing.
Quick introduction for the folks warming up to call me a bot. I spent almost twenty-three years as an Army combat medic and about twenty as a paramedic in Cleveland, mostly overnights. I have taught Anatomy and Physics for seventeen years in a district where every kid qualifies for free lunch. I have a wife, four kids, a mortgage, and a teacher’s salary, and I have put the name-brand cereal back on the shelf so the youngest would not see me do it.
And I have already stood in a government health-care line. Three years of sleeping on one side and pretending in front of my kids that a gallon of milk did not hurt to lift.
So when somebody tells me the fix for American health care is a bigger version of that line, I do not hear a theory. I hear a man who has never had to explain to a patient why the list IS the treatment.
Canada’s own Supreme Court already graded this experiment. In 2005, in Chaoulli v. Quebec, the Chief Justice wrote the sentence the single-payer salesmen never put on the poster: “Access to a waiting list is not access to health care.”
The top court in Canada wrote that. About Canada.
Pop quiz. No notes.
Question one. If a system is free, why do more than a hundred thousand people a year leave it and pay again?
Question two. If 59 percent of Americans want Medicare for All, why did the party that held the House, the Senate, and the White House never bring it to a vote?
Question three. Why did a combat medic wait three years for a shoulder?
Answers at the bottom. No peeking. I can see you.
— WHAT “FREE” ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE —
Single-payer does not mean nobody pays. You pay in advance through taxes, and then you wait. If the wait is long enough, you pay again somewhere else. If the law will not let you pay at home, you get on a plane. If you cannot get on a plane, you get a pamphlet.
Meet some people. Statistics do not get wheeled onto ferries.
KRISTIN LOGAN
Dual Canadian-American citizen. U.S. Air Force veteran. Living in British Columbia. Stage 4 ovarian cancer, diagnosed in 2023 after months of her symptoms getting waved off. She has said it took nine months to get a diagnosis. You can grow a whole human being in nine months. Her oncology referral vanished. Fluid in her lungs. Fluid in her belly. Too weak to walk.
Her husband and daughter stood on a pier and watched her get wheeled onto a ferry out of British Columbia. Nobody on that pier knew if they would see her alive again. Her parents drove her across the border to Seattle, where VA doctors started chemo and American surgeons did the HIPEC operation Canadian doctors told her would never save her life.
Three years after being told she would not make two, she is alive, in remission, and living in the United States.
One grading note, because I grade claims like labs. She has also said a MAID pamphlet showed up in her mail before she ever saw an oncologist, and a Canadian physician has publicly disputed that detail. Fine. Flag the pamphlet. The nine months, the vanished referral, and the ferry are not in dispute. An Air Force veteran had to flee a “free” system to get saved by the American VA, of all places. I have complained about the VA for twenty years, and even I did not see that plot twist coming.
ALLISON DUCLUZEAU
Victoria. Fifty-seven. Rare, aggressive abdominal cancer. A surgeon gave her two months to two years and told her to get her affairs in order and think about medically assisted dying. She had just buried her own parents. She went home and told her son and daughter she might have two months.
I have sat at that kind of kitchen table, on the wrong side of a bad call. Nobody forgets the kids’ faces.
She could not even get a phone consult with the right surgeon for almost two months. So she did the system’s job for it. She researched her own disease, called doctors as far away as Taiwan, flew to California for scans, and had the surgery in Baltimore. The bill cleared $200,000.
She was offered MAID twice. Once on the phone, alone, after she got home from Baltimore. Her line to CTV: “It was that or go home and prepare to die.”
She got married on a beach in Hawaii afterward. She would rather have had the care at home with her husband in the room. The system offered her a will and a needle.
JOLENE VAN ALSTINE
Regina. Forty-five. Eight years of vomiting, fractures, and bone pain from a parathyroid disease. Three surgeries, and the gland was still in there. No surgeon in Saskatchewan could do the next one, and no endocrinologist was taking new patients to refer her out.
So a devout Catholic who believes suicide is a sin applied for MAID, because she could not get the surgery. She was approved.
Then the cameras showed up. Glenn Beck offered to fly her to Florida. A parathyroid center in Tampa took the case. Her health minister suddenly found time to meet with her. As of January 2026 she was still alive, with surgeons in two countries finally talking.
A microphone moved her file faster than the ministry did. That is not a health-care system. That is a lottery with a stethoscope.
MIRIAM LANCASTER
Eighty-four. Vancouver. Woke up in so much pain her daughter called an ambulance. She says the first thing out of the young ER doctor’s mouth, with no tests back and no diagnosis, was an offer of MAID.
“I just wanted to find out why I was in pain. I did not want to die.”
It was a cracked sacrum. I splinted and transported more of those on my Cleveland truck than I can count. We called that a Tuesday.
She said no. She did rehab. She went to her daughter’s wedding. She rode a horse. Then this eighty-four-year-old woman climbed an active VOLCANO in Guatemala. The hospital opened with death, and she answered with a volcano. Her family’s line belongs on every whiteboard in America: it is demeaning to be offered death as a care plan.
ALEX SHVED
Etobicoke, Ontario. Thirty-seven. A five-month-old and a two-year-old at home. Stage 4 melanoma. The drug he needed was not available in Canada on any timeline a dying man can use, and Ontario’s out-of-country program said no, because it is not an “interim fund.”
So a father of two hired a lawyer. In September 2026, an Ontario court overturned the refusal and wrote that he would likely be dead by Christmas if he did not get the drug within weeks.
A dad had to sue his own government to race Santa Claus.
THE RAPID-FIRE ROUND
o Melanie Leeson, a veteran in British Columbia: 111 days from ovarian cancer diagnosis to treatment, when the target was four weeks. They would not treat her without a biopsy, and she was stuck in line waiting for the biopsy. Joseph Heller had a whole war to work with and could not write a better Catch-22.
o Tracy Polewczuk, Quebec, spina bifida: told twice, unprompted, that she qualified for MAID. “It feels like we are being pushed towards the MAID program instead of being given the help to live.”
o A Nova Scotia grandmother: asked about MAID before her first mastectomy, before her second, and again in the recovery room. While she was still coming out of anesthesia.
o Susan Webster, a retired nurse in Scotland: told nothing could be done for her lung cancer and sent home to die. MD Anderson in Texas did the biopsy and the radiation, and the tumor nearly disappeared. Back home, a new tumor, and she was sent home a second time.
o Zena Stoffman, Toronto: months waiting on an MRI while a tumor pressed on her spine. She got the scan early only because her husband, a health reporter, knew a radiologist. His question: what about the family that does not know a radiologist?
o Samia Saikali, Victoria, grandmother: waited more than ten weeks to see a specialist for an aggressive cancer. She chose MAID. She is the one who had no exit.
— STILL NOT ENOUGH? HERE ARE MORE PLANE TICKETS —
Every time I post a story like Logan’s, somebody shows up with “That is one person.” Fine. I am a teacher, and I never turn down a student who asks for more homework.
DI PIETRO GREGORIO
Maple, Ontario. Seventy-eight. Crohn’s disease since 1985. A bowel blockage at Christmas 2019 started four years and NINE Ontario operations. He ended up with two ostomy bags, on IV nutrition, in pain, looking for a way to end his life because he was told nothing more could be done.
In January 2024 his family drove him to the Cleveland Clinic, forty-five minutes from my classroom. An eleven-hour reconstruction. The family took a $600,000 line of credit against their business to pay for it.
He woke up with no bags.
Ontario’s health plan denied the bill, because his case did not meet the “regulatory definition of an emergency.” A seventy-eight-year-old man on IV nutrition, looking for a way to die, and a government office ruled it was not an emergency. I worked twenty years of overnights on a Cleveland ambulance. If that is not an emergency, their definition must be written in disappearing ink.
His line: “I had three months to live if I didn’t do this.” His surgeon said he was crying in the office. The last hope was in Ohio. The state the coastal crowd flies over.
Quick question for the replies before we go on. If it were your father with two bags and an IV, would you have signed for that $600,000 line of credit? I know my answer. I want yours.
CELYN HARDING-JONES
Montreal. Mother of two. A cyst in her brain that had been growing for nearly twenty years. Quebec’s neurosurgeons said they did not have the expertise, and their plan was to wait until it burst.
Their plan was literally “wait for the thing in your skull that can kill you to do the thing that kills people, and then we will take it from there.” I have seen better plans written on a cafeteria napkin by a kid who skipped first period.
Quebec’s plan refused to cover care in another country twice. She raised about $200,000 U.S., and a surgeon in New York took it out in November 2023. She calls the scar a warrior’s mark. “I’m fighting for my life, so I have no option.”
AND THE REST OF THE BOARDING LINE
o Kendra Kowalski: lung cancer, told there was no hope. Fifteen round trips to Arizona, about 3,200 miles each way, for an immunotherapy the drug company paid for. Seven years later her American oncologist used the word “cured.” I complain about driving across Medina County for parent-teacher conferences.
o Cairista MacIsaac: endometriosis, quoted up to two years for surgery. She paid $28,000 in New York and went back to full-time work without the nerve pain. When the disease does not wait, the waiting IS the treatment, just the wrong one.
o Megan Smith, England, twenty-four, stage 4 rectal cancer: the NHS moved her to palliative care. At twenty-four. Mayo in Florida found eleven brain tumors and took out four in emergency surgery, with a $500,000 bill on the way. I do not have her ending. I do know the NHS wrote “comfort care” and Mayo wrote “next.”
o Kent Pankow, Edmonton: sixteen days stuck in Alberta paperwork while his brain tumor moved somewhere the surgeons called unreachable. Friends raised $106,000 for Mayo in Minnesota. The line that traveled with his story is the best summary of single-payer ever printed: the system is only as good as the length of the line, and whether you have the right disease at the right time.
o Kylee Carnegie-Middlebrook and Cynthia Mitchell: two more cancer patients who found a chair in Pittsburgh and Houston after Canada said no. Both stories are unfinished, so I am counting the offer, not the outcome. The Pittsburgh surgeon told CBC that Canadians keep showing up in his office, and the reason is always the same. They were not offered the operation at home.
Every one of them got out through the same door. A line of credit, a GoFundMe, a drug company, a friend who knew somebody. Close that door in American law, and the next Gregorio does not have a Cleveland to drive to. He has two bags, an IV, and a form letter explaining what counts as an emergency.
— THE ONES WHO STAYED ON THE LIST —
Everybody above bought a ticket. Now for the people who did not. These are the hardest paragraphs in this article, and they should be.
The big number first, graded honestly.
, using hospital data from freedom-of-information requests, counted at least 23,746 Canadians who died while waiting for surgery or a scan between April 2024 and March 2025. Over 100,000 since 2018. Some provinces did not report, so it is a floor.
The caveat goes on the board too: that counts people who died WHILE on a list, not people a coroner says the list killed. Plenty of those were waiting on a knee or a cataract. But a real piece of that number is hearts and cancer, and the governments do not publish the split.
The families do.
DEBBIE FEWSTER
Manitoba. Sixty-nine. Mother of three, grandmother of ten. Told in July 2024 she needed heart surgery within three weeks. Her son says the file did not go where it was supposed to.
She died on Thanksgiving, still waiting.
Ten grandkids, an empty chair, and a referral sitting in the wrong inbox. Her family is now pushing “Debbie’s Law,” which says if the system cannot do the surgery inside the window the doctors wrote down, it has to SAY so. Somebody needed a law to make a hospital admit it is late. In America, you would have a second opinion and another hospital by lunch. In Manitoba you get a grief counselor, if you can get on that list.
LAURA HILLIER
Burlington, Ontario. Eighteen. Leukemia, back out of remission. She had matching stem-cell donors, which is the hard part of a transplant, and it was DONE.
The hospital had beds for about five transplants a month. She was number thirty-three in line. Not for a donor. For a bed.
She walked across her graduation stage in gloves and a mask and got a standing ovation. Then she went back to the ward. She died January 20, 2016, of a cancer her own transplant doctor called beatable.
I have watched a lot of eighteen-year-olds cross a stage. I cannot write anything clever about this one, and I am not going to try.
STEVEN WONG
Edmonton. Forty-one. Three boys at home. Stage 4 stomach cancer diagnosed May 2, 2024. Dead eleven weeks later. His wife says not once did he see or speak to a cancer doctor. He was ready to fight. The roadblock was the appointment.
Her line should be taped to the bathroom mirror of every Medicare for All supporter in America: if she could go back to the day of the diagnosis, she would put him on a plane and leave.
THE REST OF THE CLOCK
o Dan Quayle, Victoria, fifty-two: esophageal cancer. His oncologist’s office said they were backlogged, so hang in there. Like a cat poster in a dentist’s office. The chemo never started. He chose MAID.
o Jerry Dunham, Alberta, forty-six, father of two: told during the COVID pause that his pacemaker was “non-essential” and to call back in a year or two. Dead seven weeks later. Pandemic asterisk noted. The asterisk did not put the device in his chest.
o Joan Hama, British Columbia: her colonoscopy should have happened within 60 days. She got an eight-month list. Four months in, a tumor ruptured her colon, and she says she was brought back more than once on the table.
o Sara Gillooly, British Columbia, mother of two: breast cancer out in July, no oncologist for two months. She was told the wait was good news because it meant she was not a priority. By November it was in her lungs. I have hung green triage tags on real people in mass-casualty drills. Green means you wait. Somebody hung a green tag on a mother with breast cancer.
o Finlay van der Werken, Ontario, sixteen, hockey player, wanted to be a veterinarian: eight hours in an ER waiting room before a doctor saw him. Sepsis. Cardiac arrest. Life support withdrawn two days later. That is an ER wait, not a surgical list, and I am keeping the categories separate. I am also a medic who knows what eight untreated hours of sepsis looks like. It looks like a code.
And British coroners are writing it down with an official stamp. A retired history teacher in Chelmsford started cancer treatment on day 81 when the target was 62, and was dead three months after her first doctor visit. In Basildon, a man’s CT results sat unread for almost three months. Coroners in Basildon and Sunderland ruled those deaths “contributed to by neglect,” and a coroner in Wales wrote that a 144-day delay contributed to another. That is not my phrase. It is in the official findings.
If you have ever waited on a list with somebody you love, VA, Medicaid, an insurance denial, or another country’s system, tell me how long in the replies. I read every one.
— A HEART, A HIP, AND A CALENDAR —
The cancer cases get the microphone. These are the quiet ones.
Ontario Health’s own numbers: 355 patients died in one year waiting for heart surgery or a heart procedure, and at least 90 of them had already blown past the target wait. No tumor. Just a pump and a calendar.
Prashant Sreekumar, Edmonton, forty-four, father of three. Chest pain at work, December 2025, pain he called fifteen out of ten. His family says he was given Tylenol and told to keep waiting. His blood pressure climbed. He threw up in the waiting room. More than eight hours after triage he was finally called back, sat down, put his hand on his chest, and crashed. His father says he died right there.
That is still the family’s account, not a finished inquest. But I was a paramedic for twenty years. A forty-four-year-old with crushing chest pain and vomiting gets aspirin, a twelve-lead, and a ride with the lights on in my truck. In that waiting room he got Tylenol and a plastic chair. Three kids are going to grow up hearing about the Tylenol.
Then there are the joints. A hip rarely shows up on a death certificate. It just parks you. You stop walking, the weight goes on, the clot risk goes up, and the last year of a life gets spent in an apartment waiting for the phone to ring.
Neil Payne, Prince Edward Island, an avid hiker, waited nine months and was told to expect another twelve to fifteen. He dropped thirty pounds and turned into an old man on painkillers. So he and his wife borrowed $25,000 and drove to a private clinic in Montreal. They called it “Le Hip Trip.” Montreal could do it only because Chaoulli pried that door open a crack.
Linda Slater, Calgary, eighty-three, waited two years just to SEE a surgeon, then emptied her retirement savings for a $33,000 private knee.
And then my favorite quote in this whole article. Linda Bestard’s friends chipped in $30,000 for her private hip, and she told CBC with a straight face: “We’re not America, we’re Canada. We get health care when we need it.”
She said that, and then she wrote the cheque. I could retire this article and just post that quote.
Across the pond, Nicky Hatton, a full-time caregiver for her disabled son, was told to use a walking stick and wait at least another year for a hip she describes as broken glass. She flew to Lithuania and paid £8,600. What is next, the NHS paying with British tax money to send its own patients to the Baltics for hips?… Wait, I was just told it already does that.
— “THAT IS NOT THE MAJORITY. YOU ONLY GAVE ME TWO CASES.” —
Pencils out. Let’s count.
So far in this article: close to forty real people who fled, paid twice, died on a list, or got offered death instead of care. Behind them:
o 23,746 Canadians who died on a surgery or scan list in one year.
o 355 Ontarians who died waiting on heart care in one year.
o 105,529 Canadians who left the country for treatment in one year.
o 523,000 Britons who did the same in 2024.
o 5.9 million Canadian adults with no family doctor at all.
The claim on the left is not “some people wait.” Nobody argues with that. The claim is “single-payer is better, and nobody in their right mind would leave it.” That is a universal claim, and one black swan ends “all swans are white.” I brought a flock and then the bird census.
“That is not the majority” is the goalposts getting picked up and carried down the field. And run the logic on anything else. “Most airplanes land safely, so stop complaining about the ones that don’t.” “Most vets got their appointment, so the Phoenix VA secret wait list was no big deal.” Nobody says that out loud, because it sounds monstrous out loud. It sounds just as monstrous in a reply.
Besides, most of any health system is sinus infections and blood-pressure refills. Every system on earth handles the sinus infection. You grade an ambulance crew by the worst call of the night, and you grade a health system the same way. Cancer. Hearts. Brains. That is exactly where Canada’s numbers fall apart, and exactly where the plane tickets get bought.
And to the young man in my replies who called me a Big Pharma boot-licker for saying any of this: under Medicare for All, the government becomes Big Pharma’s ONLY customer. Every drug, every patient, one giant check. You are not fighting Big Pharma. You are handing them a lifetime subscription with autopay. If you want to stick it to the health-care giants, put the dollar in a health savings account and let a family shop with it.
While we are on that, what happened to the crowd that spent 2024 turning Luigi Mangione into a folk hero for supposedly hating insurance companies? After the ACA took full effect, UnitedHealth’s revenue went from roughly $110 billion to $372 billion. The left cannot hate the insurers on Monday and beg Congress for a bigger ACA subsidy check to mail them on Tuesday. Pick a lane.
— HOW THE MACHINE IS BUILT —
Before somebody tells me I do not understand the Canadian system, here it is in one breath.
Canada has thirteen provincial insurance plans and one federal law, the Canada Health Act of 1984. If a province lets patients pay for “medically necessary” hospital or doctor care, Ottawa claws back its money. Several provinces go further and ban private insurance for that care outright.
The province decides what “medically necessary” means, and that one definition is how they ration. When the budget runs short, nobody sends you a bill. They send you a date, and the date keeps moving.
The brochure says “universal.” The statute says hospital and doctor care. Prescription drugs outside the hospital, most dental, vision, ambulances, and most home care are not on the card. So it is not free, and it is not complete. Canadians just are not allowed to buy their way out of the line for the things that matter most.
o Median wait from referral to treatment in 2025: 28.6 weeks. In 1993 it was 9.3. A pregnancy reaches the third trimester faster.
o Neurosurgery: 49.9 weeks. Orthopedics: 48.6. New Brunswick: 60.9 weeks for the median patient.
o Canada sits near the top for spending, and 27th of 30 rich countries for doctors per person, 25th of 30 for hospital beds, and 27th of 31 for MRI machines.
High price, thin shelf, long line. If a Walmart ran like that it would be a Kmart.
Now ask yourself: what is next? A single-payer province falls so far behind on cancer radiation that it starts renting American PRIVATE clinics… wait, I was just told British Columbia already did that. Between 2023 and 2025 the province shipped about 1,100 cancer patients to two for-profit clinics in Bellingham, Washington, including a sixty-six-year-old from Fort Nelson whose own doctor offered him the trip. Then the province declared victory and ended the program.
Ontario has spent more than $200 million sending patients to American clinics, mostly for proton beam therapy, which every other G7 country has and Canada does not. Sixteen-year-old Luke Serfas from Alberta thought his headaches were a hockey concussion. It was a brain tumor, and the machine he needed meant six to eight weeks in Jacksonville, Florida. That is not medical tourism. That is a country outsourcing the machine it will not buy.
The honest comparison is not Canada against some fairy tale. Australia, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands all cover everybody AND let you buy private care. Canada is the experiment that welded the second door shut. Bernie never puts Germany on his posters. He puts Canada. The salesman only ever shows you the car with the bad transmission.
And that is the whole argument in one sentence. Medicare for All, as written by its own sponsors, follows Canada, not Germany. It replaces private insurance for covered care. Every survivor in this article lived because there was a door out. If America copies Canada, there is no America to flee to. There is no Seattle south of Seattle. The rich will fly to Singapore, Bernie will be fine, and my students, your mother, and the guy who fixes your furnace get the line and a brochure.
— THE SHORT QUEUE —
Then there is the part Canada added that Britain has not. Yet.
Medical assistance in dying has been legal since 2016 and was expanded in 2021 to people who are not dying. Health Canada’s own 2024 report: 16,499 people. One in every twenty deaths in Canada. 76,475 since the law passed, and 732 in a single year who were not dying at all. A psychiatrist told Parliament that people are getting MAID for reasons that are frankly illegal, including being on a waiting list. Mental illness alone is scheduled to qualify in March 2027.
I am not going to convict any one doctor from a newspaper story. I am going to point at the incentive, because incentives are Physics. Water runs downhill. People take the shorter line. When the treatment line is long and the death line is short, some number of desperate people will take the short one.
Quinn’s First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always produces the exact opposite of its stated intent. They named it the Affordable Care Act, and premiums never got the memo. Canada named a death program “Medical Assistance in Dying,” and then acted surprised when dying got easier than treatment.
— EVERYBODY LOVES THE CAKE UNTIL THE BILL SHOWS UP —
posted a video with five percentages and no source. No pollster, no date, no sample size. If a sophomore turned that in, it would come back with one word across the top in red. CITATION.
Behind him hung a red raised-fist poster reading “For the Many, Not the Few,” which was Jeremy Corbyn’s slogan. In 2019 British voters handed Corbyn’s Labour its worst defeat since 1935. Bernie hung the losing team’s jersey on the wall and filmed a video about how popular he is. That is a lecture on poker strategy in front of a photo of your own repossessed truck. The man has a leak in the think tank, and the whole basement is flooded.
“Fifty-nine percent want Medicare for All.” Sure, Bernie. Ask people if they want free health care and they say yes. Ask them if they want a free puppy and they say yes. Then ask the follow-up. Kaiser did, in 2019:
o 56 percent liked Medicare for All.
o Tell them it ends private insurance: 37 percent.
o Tell them it means delays: 26 percent.
That majority evaporated like a puddle on a Cleveland sidewalk in July. Sometimes the majority just means all the fools are on the same side, right up until somebody reads them the fine print.
And if 59 percent want it, why did Democrats hold the House, Senate, and White House in 2021 and 2022 and never call the vote? Kamala co-sponsored it in 2019 and spent 2024 running from it like it was on fire. Even his own party will not buy the product.
They could not even keep the “Affordable” one standing. Democrats passed the extra COVID subsidies in the American Rescue Plan, extended them in the Inflation Reduction Act with zero Republican votes on either bill, wrote the expiration date themselves, and then blamed Republicans when the date arrived. That is setting your own kitchen timer and suing the oven.
Picture walking into your boss’s office: “Last month you gave me a thousand-dollar Christmas bonus. This month you didn’t. You CUT MY PAY, you heartless monster.” That is the argument. In public. With a straight face. And it admits, out loud, that the Affordable Care Act is unaffordable without emergency pandemic money. Thank you for grading your own homework.
Madison warned in Federalist No. 10 about majorities using their numbers for “an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.” Article I, Section 8 lists what Congress may do, and health care is not on the list. The Tenth Amendment hands the rest to the states and the people. We are a constitutional republic, not a popularity contest with a flag on it. Even if Bernie’s poll survived the fine print, the Founders built this country so a fifty-one percent mood swing could not nationalize your doctor.
If I polled my classroom tomorrow, I would get 100 percent against homework and 100 percent for a grading system where my A students donate points to the kids who skipped half the semester. It is just common sense. I actually ran that experiment once, and you can see how it went:
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2071972756619403531
Quinn’s Law Number Nine: to a liberal, intentions matter more than outcomes. Every poll measures the intention. Not one measures the outcome.
— TWO RICH MEN HOLDING HANDS —
Quinn’s Law Number Twenty-Five: liberals are great at giving away other people’s money.
and Bernie stood on a stage in San Francisco, hands clasped and arms raised like they just won a title belt, demanding a one-time wealth tax for kids’ health care.
Ro’s household disclosures run from $69 million to more than $167 million. Bernie has three houses and spent $221,000 on private jets in one quarter of 2025, plus millions from books about how awful it is when people make millions.
The tax starts at a billion. Just high enough to miss Ro, miss Bernie, and miss every single person on that stage. The line always gets drawn one inch above the heads of the men drawing it. I would not trust these two to run a lemonade stand.
And it is ONE-TIME. Health care is a monthly bill, gentlemen. Kids get sick in month two. A one-time tax from a politician is “just one more episode” at midnight, and nobody in human history has stopped at one. You cannot tax a moving truck. You can only wave at it. A one-time wealth tax does not buy a neurosurgeon. It buys a press conference and a U-Haul to Nevada.
Bernie has been in Congress since 1991 and Ro since 2017. Almost half a century in the building that WRITES the tax code. Every loophole they complain about came out of their own office building. Quinn’s Law Number Seven: it is different when you are a Democrat. A Republican with nine figures is an oligarch. A Democrat with nine figures is a champion of working families.
My standing offer, which nobody has ever taken. Every millionaire chanting “tax the rich” can lead by example. Standard deduction only. No itemizing, no trusts. Pay DOUBLE what the IRS says you owe and post the returns. Do that, and I will come to the next rally and hold a sign. Until then, two rich men demanding somebody ELSE pay first have the credibility of a scratched lottery ticket. Hypocrites.
I already did the full autopsy on Bernie’s lifestyle:
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2019782120026091775
And Bernie, socialism can work… you are just not going to like how:
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2102001951458119794
— I HAVE ALREADY BEEN THE PATIENT IN YOUR PLAN —
The Phoenix VA scandal was not a theory. Administrators kept secret wait lists, and veterans died waiting for appointments the official numbers said had already happened. Those were my brothers and sisters on those lists. People fix the problems they personally feel and “manage” the ones they only read about.
So here is a rule from my platform. A member of Congress gets health coverage through exactly three doors: TRICARE at a drilling reservist’s premium, the VA at the access a 50-percent-rated veteran gets, or the plan a public-school teacher gets in their home state. Put a senator in the scheduling queue for his own knee, and I will bet my house the queue shrinks inside eighteen months.
The whole Congressional skin-in-the-game plan is here:
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2105646722835706244
And here is the government health system we already have, aimed at the people who bled for it. Get medically retired before twenty years because of a combat wound, and the retirement you earned gets clawed back dollar for dollar against the disability pay for that wound. The government that broke you sends you a bill for being broken.
The Major Richard Star Act, HR 2102, fixes that for roughly $10 billion over ten years. Senator Roger Wicker co-sponsored it, then objected to it on the Senate floor, while posting that losing even one hero to suicide is one too many. Waiting for the wounded to die so the cost score gets smaller is just a waiting list with a spreadsheet.
Call your representative at (202) 225-3121 and ask them to sign discharge petition H.Res. 1247. Here is why I will never stop asking:
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2098966443521876075
— STOP SAYING THERE IS NO PLAN —
There is a plan. It is not a slogan and it is not a one-time tax. Here it is in the order a medic triages. Steal it. Argue with it.
ONE. KEEP THE EXIT LEGAL. Private insurance and cash pay stay legal for every covered service, in plain English, in the statute. Every survivor in this article lived because that door was open. Anybody who wants a public plan can run one. They do not get to nail the other door shut and call the nails compassion.
TWO. PUT THE DOLLAR IN THE PATIENT’S HAND. A funded health savings account plus real catastrophic coverage. The MRI center that posts $400 beats the hospital that hides $2,400. Subsidies follow the person into the HSA, not the insurance company.
THREE. POST THE PRICE BEFORE THE PROCEDURE. Cash price, insured price, and Medicare price on the wall, plus infection and readmission rates. You cannot shop a price you are not allowed to see. More on this in Part 3 of my platform:
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2105702363734405427
FOUR. LET INSURANCE CROSS STATE LINES, with a funded high-risk pool so nobody sick gets dumped. A teacher in Medina should be able to buy the plan a teacher in Indiana can buy.
FIVE. FIX THE SUPPLY. More residency slots. Supervised licensing for qualified foreign doctors. Let nurse practitioners work to their training. Repeal the certificate-of-need laws that let one hospital veto a new surgery center down the road. You do not shorten a 49-week neurosurgery wait with a nicer waiting-room magazine. You add a neurosurgeon.
SIX. KEEP THE SAFETY NET A FLOOR, NOT A MONOPOLY. Medicaid for the poor. A VA good enough that a combat medic does not wait three years for a shoulder. The ER stays open to everyone. And treat the trillions in federal improper payments as a crime instead of a rounding error.
SEVEN. TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT TRADEOFFS. A market will not make a $515,000 cell therapy free. Rationing it by committee does not make it cheaper. It just makes it political, which is how a father of two ends up in a courtroom racing Christmas.
EIGHT. PUT CONGRESS ON THE PLAN. TRICARE, the VA, or the teacher plan. The member who has to live on the plan he votes for will suddenly discover wait times are real.
Measure it by wait times, cash prices, how many people leave the country, and how long a veteran waits for a shoulder. If the numbers do not move, I will say so in public. That is more than the Affordable Care Act ever promised.
The money side of the plan, including how a family keeps more of its own dollars, is here:
https://x.com/BskiMike22802/status/2105665730897195208
— THE LAB REPORT —
If a sophomore turned in “other countries have free health care, therefore single-payer,” I would hand it back with one word on it. Citation.
Here is the citation. A veteran wheeled onto a ferry while her daughter watched from the pier. An eighty-four-year-old offered death for a cracked bone, who then climbed a volcano. A seventy-eight-year-old with two bags, told it was not an emergency, who woke up in Cleveland without them. A grandmother of ten who died on Thanksgiving waiting on a three-week bypass. An eighteen-year-old with a matching donor who died waiting for a bed. A father of three boys who never once spoke to a cancer doctor. A man with crushing chest pain who got Tylenol and a plastic chair. A Supreme Court that already wrote the conclusion. A poll that collapses at the first follow-up question. And a VA list with my name on the shoulder line for three years.
Stop saying the right has no alternative. We have one. It starts by refusing to make the American exit illegal, because once you do, there is nowhere left on earth to go.
Answers to the pop quiz.
One. More than a hundred thousand leave because the list is not care.
Two. They never called the vote because they knew the bill kills the poll.
Three. The shoulder took three years because a government clinic does not lose a customer when it loses a year.
Pencils down
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
—
X (Twitter): x.com/BskiMike22802
Substack: substack.com/@bskimike22802
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@BskiMike22802
AFNN: https://afnn.us/author/mikeborowski/
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA