The following content is sponsored by Americans for Limited Government.
Kamala Harris is well known for her confusing, inconsistent, and tragically hilarious word salads. Her most frequent trip back to the salad bar is when she asks her supporters to imagine, “What can be, unburdened by what has been.”
Two years ago, Harris exercised her one constitutional responsibility as vice president and broke the 50-50 tie on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a seminal part of the Biden-Harris administration’s “Investing in America agenda.” She owns responsibility for the damage to Medicare that it has done.
Among the more damaging provisions the Biden-Harris regime snuck into the IRA were measures to expand the federal healthcare bureaucracy by $3 billion. Every clear-thinking person on the planet knows that healthcare dollars should be spent on healing patients rather than hiring bureaucrats or on enriching middlemen, like massively wealthy pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).
Yet under the aegis of “reducing inflation,” the Democrats have sought to drown patients and providers in a sea of restrictions, regulations, and waste. Indeed, as one expert sounded the alarm before Congress, the IRA law empowers politicians and bureaucrats – many without any medical expertise at all – to rule on healthcare policy in secret, bypassing public notice and accountability.
Alas this is all-too symptomatic of their approach to governance: find solutions that empower your political machine rather than yield positive results. The paradigm was perfectly summed up in Fred Siegel’s magnificent Revolt Against the Masses, where he wrote, “As a matter of policy, liberalism has been a very expensive failure. As a matter of patronage, against which it once rebelled, it has been a considerable success.”
Putting special interests above the people would have been a more accurate name for the IRA. Unfortunately, stealing money from seniors has been all too commonplace in the Biden-Harris White House. Their regime raided almost $300 billion from Medicare and reallocated those funds to bogus pro-China “green” projects. And then to cover up the resulting Medicare Part D premium increases that resulted, they raided billions more from the Medicare Trust Fund to bail out big insurance companies right before the election.
The American healthcare system is increasingly falling behind as critical funds are funneled into bureaucratic red tape rather than innovation. Administrative costs have exploded, diverting resources that could otherwise fuel groundbreaking medical advancements. Instead of prioritizing cutting-edge research and life-saving treatments, far too much healthcare spending is consumed by paperwork, compliance protocols, and outdated systems. This misallocation of funds stifles research, patient care, and global competitiveness.
To fix this, Donald Trump recently called for the creation of an efficiency commission to perform “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.” This visionary idea was pitched to him by none other than Elon Musk, who has also volunteered to lead it.
Instead of more word salads, America needs real solutions. The Trump-Musk efficiency commission will claw back the $3 billion that Biden and Harris are spending on a new federal healthcare bureaucracy and instead put the focus back on stabilizing Medicare where it belongs.
