Liberal ‘Vox’ Praises Donald Trump Insight On Healthcare Policy At GOP Debate

The liberal Vox website isn’t a place where you would ordinarily come across Donald Trump praise, but columnist Matthew Yglesias, after watching Trump’s performance at Thursday’s GOP debate, had plenty of good things to say about the Donald’s healthcare policy ideas.

While most of the attention has been on Trump’s guffaw-inducing wisecrack aimed at Rosie O’Donnell, not as much press has been given to his healthcare stance.

As far as that goes, Trump sounded more progressive than conservative, musing that at one time single-payer could have worked in the United States the way it does in other countries like Canada.

However, Trump cited a detail called “path dependency” that makes the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and any drive for single-payer unrealistic.

“It works in Canada,” Trump said, adding “it works incredibly well in Scotland.” He also added that “it could have worked in a different age” in the U.S., but is not “currently suited to our problems.”

Here’s what the liberal Vox had to say about Trump’s views.

“What Trump is talking about here is path dependency, and it’s a reasonable point. It’s one thing to set up a National Health Service in the wake of World War II. It’s another thing entirely to come 75 years later and completely upend a system that is working pretty well for most people and that enormous institutions have made deep investments in. It’s easy to dismiss this message when coming from Trump, but Atul Gawande has written brilliantly about path dependency in health-care reform and my colleague Sarah Kliff’s masterful profile of Vermont’s failed effort to build a single-payer system further underscores the concerns about path dependency.”

“Is the idea that a system could work well in one country but not in the US crazy? Not according to leading health wonk Uwe Reinhardt, who, like Trump, is an admirer of some foreign single-payer systems but skeptical of trying to remake the United States in their image.”

Yglesias then goes in to Trump’s idea of a common market — private — “without the artificial lines around every state.”

This would allow for greater competition to drive down price, and that’s a point that Yglesias admonished other GOP candidates for not addressing.

“Obviously the big question about federalizing insurance regulation is what would the regulations say? This would have been a great issue for other candidates to grill Trump on or offer their own thoughts about. After all, if Trump is as much of a clown as everyone says, surely a serious dialogue about the issues would expose him as an empty suit…. But nobody rose to the challenge.”

Here’s a little more on Trump’s healthcare ideas.

The liberal Vox site is not the only progressive media figure to take notice of Trump’s viability. Even his enemy Bill Maher has referred to him as “genius” and said that he could “go all the way” to the White House in recent sit-downs.

[Image via Andrew Cline / Shutterstock.com]