“Did he say single payer, government run, socialized universal health care?”
Read for yourself what Trump said:
“We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing. What would universal care look like? Nebraska senator Kerrey and others have advocated a version of the Canadian-style, single-payer system in which all payments for medical care are made to a single agency (as opposed to the large number of HMOs and insurance companies, with their diverse rules, claim forms, and deductibles ).
A recent study done by the Massachusetts Medical Society says that in Massachusetts the single-payer plan would save $ 5 billion or about one-seventh of the overhead spent on medical care. Administrative costs across America make up 25 percent of the healthcare dollar, which is two-and-a-half times the cost of healthcare administration in Canada. Doctors might be paid less than they are now, as is the case in Canada, but they would be able to treat more patients because of the reduction in their paperwork.
The Canadian plan also helps Canadians live longer and healthier than Americans. There are fewer medical lawsuits, less loss of labor to sickness, and lower costs to companies paying for the medical care of their employees. If the program were in place in Massachusetts in 1999 it would have reduced administrative costs by $ 2.5 million. We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing. But implementing such a plan is not simple. One major problem is that the single-payer plan in Canada is in financial difficulty, as is the nationalized plan in the United Kingdom. We have to improve on the prototype.”
— Donald Trump, The America We Deserve, p.208
From a Canadian perspective Trump is wrong on the efficiency of a single payer system. It looks good in theory but once put into practice, it is an utter waste and the bureaucracies that are instituted to maintain the machine are abhorrent. Keep in mind that in Canada, healthcare is the purview of the province and not the federal gov’t. Provinces receive transfer payments from the federal government and the provinces are responsible for the budgeting and cost. Since there is no competitive marketplace to control or reduce costs, healthcare is in effect they are always out of control and thus rationing occurs. So no Universal healthcare is not the panacea that Trump thinks it is. Bref. A national healthcare system will only create a federalized bureaucracy that will only be be-holdened to itself and unionized and be inevitably an arm of the democratic party. New York Values Baby!!
That book was written 16 yrs ago, before the recession and before Obama. He was looking at various approaches, he did not advocate for one definitive policy:
He also wrote in that book:
“We need a change in the tax code that would give groups and individuals tax breaks for health insurance that are equivalent to those that corporations now receive. This would allow ordinary citizens to buy coverage that compliments their company policy and gives them more of what they need. It would also give them the option to jettison the company policy altogether and just buy their own insurance.”