Progressive Democrats achieved significant victories in the 2026 primaries, positioning themselves to expand their influence within the Democratic Party. Nearly 30 new progressive candidates are expected to join Congress in January.
Progressive candidates successfully defeated long-standing incumbents and established politicians in various races. The major influx of new progressive members is likely to shape legislative priorities and strategies within the Democratic majority.
The implications will be profound. The success of progressive Democrats indicates a shift in the party’s dynamics, potentially leading to more left-leaning policies and initiatives in the upcoming congressional sessions. Nobody bothers to look has such progressive policies ever work? Universal Health Care sounds great, but that means the doctors must become public employees as in UK. In the UK, seeking private healthcare to bypass wait times is a common and growing phenomenon. The desire for speed is consistently cited as the primary motivation for people who choose to pay for private treatment or use private medical insurance.
In Canada, doctors typically operate as independent contractors or private entities who bill the provincial government for medically necessary services provided to patients. Waiting lines (or wait times) are a well-documented and significant issue in Canada’s healthcare system. While it is not a single line, patients routinely face delays at multiple points of care, from seeing a family doctor to receiving specialist treatment or surgery. I have friends who have flown to the USA to get urgent health care.
Look at France, everything is free and the government if going broke and you have widespread civil unrest. In France, the deterioration of the healthcare system is a genuine grievance and appears on some protest signs. It is true that France faces serious challenges in healthcare access. There are documented long waits for specialist appointments (e.g., a median of 42 days for a cardiologist) and overcrowded emergency rooms. Millions also lack a regular family doctor.
Protesters have highlighted this. At a recent demonstration, one participant held a sign criticizing hospital funding cuts, and a protester from Jura stated, “We can’t get to the hospital on time when we’re sick”. However, this is part of a larger complaint about the general collapse of public services, rather than the specific spark for the rioting.
My own doctor had worked for the Veteran’s Administration. She quite over COVID because the directive came down you will administer the vaccine that she disagreed with. Public Healthcare also means the directive from above must be followed.
The major 2014 scandal involving Obama and veteran healthcare was not about him cutting funding. The core of the scandal was the secret waitlists and falsification of records at Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, where staff manipulated appointment data to hide long delays in care for veterans.
The scandal erupted in 2014, centering on allegations that VA facilities were creating secret lists to conceal how long veterans were actually waiting for appointments. The scandal gained national attention from whistleblower reports at the Phoenix VA, where it was alleged that staff kept a secret waitlist and that up to 40 veterans may have died while waiting for care.
The only way to possibly create universal health care is that the government replaces insurance companies and procedures have set prices. Even then there is still medicare fraud etc. There is simply no perfect solution. Yet, we constantly have this dream that somehow government is our savior. Stalin found confiscating all private property and putting bureaucrats in charge of making decisions when and what to plant ended up creating a massive famine.
This is one of my favorite quotes from Milton Friedman. Government is a necessary evil. It is not there to be Santa Clause. That was Marx’s idea. It takes two wage earners to run a household today. Most people pay more in Social Security taxes than in income taxes and they will never get back what they paid in in real terms. Then the government takes from your salary taxes and pretends it is magnanimous sending you a refund check, but they are borrowing money from the poor and do not even pay them interest.
We had to swing to this side so people of the next generation are slapped in the face because this is getting worse by the year. Neither party is willing to actually fix anything because they will be focused on raising money for the next election. Nobody is interested in the long-term solutions.