AZ Congressman Says Coming Revolution Will Upend Health Care, Drop Prices Dramatically
It’s the kind of true progress that “progressives” never seem to understand.
Two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, not only is the economy booming, but the country is on the brink of a health care revolution that could put affordable health care within reach for the vast majority of Americans.
And all the government has to do is figure out how to get out of the way.
In an interview at The Western Journal office, U.S. Rep. Dave Schweikert, R-Ariz., now serving his fifth term in the House, told Senior News Editor Josh Manning that advances in medical technology have reached a turning point.
“There’s a revolution in technology that’s changed the price structure of health care, but we have to step up and understand that we have to make that work,” he said.
Schweikert cited the potential of “autonomous” medical clinics now operating in the Phoenix area, where patients’ vital signs are recorded entirely by artificial intelligence, as an example of the kinds of developments that can make preventive care easier and less expensive for the general population.
For the relatively small part of the population that makes up the bulk of actual medical costs, he said, technological breakthroughs are looming that are likely to drastically reduce those costs.
“This is a time actually around health care to be incredibly optimistic,” Schweikert said. “Technology here is going to crash the price. And technology over here to cure.
“If we do this well, all the sudden it’s no longer the argument about who gets to pay and who gets subsidized. It’s now a discussion of what we pay and how dramatically healthier we are as a society.”
But of course, the technological revolution goes way beyond just the field of medicine — and Schweikert’s confident optimism in the United States and its future does too.
After the miasma of the Barack Obama presidency, where a Democratic White House spent years strangling the American economy with burdensome regulation, the Trump years — and particularly the 2017 tax cuts — have opened the way for an economy that seems to be breaking old economic rules.
“I need to go back and take every textbook I ever studied under and throw it away,” Schweikert said. “Because we were always told, ‘If you have full employment, you’re gonna have inflation, you’ll have this …’
“Turns out, we have full employment, more jobs than we have workers, no inflation, and technology maybe crushing price gains.”
That’s not the image the mainstream media is trying to paint about the Trump years (though even a New York Times writer in a Sunday piece had to admit that the strength of the economy was going to hurt Democratic chances in 2020 — like that’s a bad thing).
That’s because the narrative liberals are pushing is that Trump is damaging the country irreparably.
Schweikert, like most Republicans, sees things differently. And he sees them firsthand.
“The narrative I want us to work with is based in fact,” he told Manning, citing a recent visit to a charity called St. Joseph the Worker in downtown Phoenix.
“Their job is to try to get these most disaffected in our society jobs,” the congressman said. “You walk in the door, and they have a stack of jobs on the table. They don’t even have enough homeless people for the jobs.
“That’s a miracle.”
Then he asked a key question: “Where’s the joy? Shouldn’t there be almost this joy in our society, from the most left to the most conservative, shouldn’t there be this joy that good things are happening?”
Well, a joyful populace doesn’t exactly make life easy for an opposition party — and the mainstream media that’s invested in Democratic success and Trump’s failure has little to gain by giving Americans a true picture of how well things are going.
Or, as Manning put it, “It’s hard to get happy people to revolt.”
And that means that what passes for journalism in the U.S. in the Trump years is almost exactly the opposite of what the field should be: Outlets are disseminating information to serve the cause of Democratic politics, not informing the public.
At some point, though, the truth will be known, Schweikert said.
Americans, he said, “should be joyful in how well the world, our society, is doing right now. You almost see this purposeful hate coming through that television show because, ‘If I give you enough rage, you’ll keep watching.’
“They don’t understand they’re being played. They’re being manipulated for money.
“Years from now, really smart people will write stories that we had an entire generation that the design of the phones they carried around, the cable news, certain things they watched. They were played.”
But that’s years away — maybe decades away.
What conservatives need to focus on now is making sure the endless Lilliputian attacks on the Trump presidency of the past two years — and their inevitably growing intensity heading into November 2020 — don’t derail what is undeniably a boom time in the country.
Whether it’s in health care, the economy or just about any serious metric, the United States is doing pretty well with Donald Trump in the White House. And it has a free-market, capitalist society to thank for it.
It’s the kind of progress “progressives” will never understand — but it’s the kind the American people do.
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