A Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate denounced capitalism as a way to solve America's broken health care system Sunday, declaring that she’s “sick and tired of hearing about the free market being the solution” to working people's health issues.
“Our fundamental responsibility is to take care of the least of these, especially when the least of these are working families who only want a little bit of access to health care," Stacey Abrams declared during a "men's town hall" in Atlanta over the weekend.
"And I am sick and tired of hearing about the free market being the solution to this problem," she went on. "Because I’ve never seen the free market write a prescription in rural Georgia. I mean, I’ve never seen the free market show up and give someone Metformin so they can have a little bit of control of their diabetes before it turns into an amputation of their foot.I’ve never seen the free market say, ‘I’m gonna replace that stint in your heart next door and not go 200 miles to get it done.’"
“The problem with the free market is the free market needs to make a profit, and there is no profit in doing the right thing,” Abrams continued.
Of course, Abrams conveniently forgot – or simply declined to mention – that the free market, and the competition and incentives it produces, was the economic conduit that lead to the very invention of diabetes medication and heart stints in the first place, and is the same driving factor that inspires med students to take out hundreds of thousands in student loans to attend med school in the hopes of a successful and profitable career as nurses, doctors, surgeons and clinical researchers. It’s the economic system that fuels innovation and medical advancement, the same advancement that allows other countries to piggyback on the medical and pharmaceutical leaps the United States created using capitalism.
She also conveniently forgot – or simply declined to mention – that the free market is the only economic system responsible for pulling millions of people out of poverty, while socialism, the antithesis to the free market, is currently sitting at a death toll of more than 100 million worldwide.
But if you’re still on the fence on whether the free market really is the solution to poverty, just head on down to socialist Venezuela, where people are dying because hospitals have run out of basic medication and surgery patients are now required to bring their own scalpels.