Most of Donald Trump’s public statements include the rote declaration that Obamacare is a disaster. This is true, of course, but it doesn’t tell us anything new. It’s only when he starts elaborating on his objections that one gets a sense of what he believes, and he doesn’t talk like a friend of the free market. During last week’s Republican debate, for example, he was asked about his past praise of single-payer health care and replied, “As far as single-payer, it works in Canada, works incredibly well in Scotland.” This answer was both antithetical to free-market thinking and profoundly ignorant.

His praise of Scotland’s system, for example, demonstrated that he is unaware of its role in creating one of the UK’s worst public health disasters. It works so “incredibly well” that tens of thousands received contaminated blood transfusions over two decades, resulting in at least 2,000 deaths and countless Hepatitis and HIV infections. Last spring, the Scottish Health Secretary found herself desperately trying to mollify an outraged public after a dilatory and unnecessarily protracted government inquiry produced widespread charges of “whitewash” by offering one generic recommendation.

As to Canada, it’s abundantly clear that Trump has never heard of the Naylor report, released last month by a blue ribbon panel led by a former president of Toronto University. To give you the general flavor of the report, it uses the term “arrested development” to describe the Canadian single-payer system: “Patients told us about limited access to a variety of services.… They also observed that the narrow scope of Medicare [the name of their national system] led to large out-of-pocket expenses for many Canadians, particularly those without work-related private health insurance plans.”

Read the full article at The American Spectator: Trump Is No Friend of Free Market Health Care