Here is Donald Trump defending his offhand statement that Australia has better health care than America:
Of course the Australians have better healthcare than we do –everybody does. ObamaCare is dead! But our healthcare will soon be great.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2017
Needless to say, Trump doesn’t have a clue about what kind of health care Australia provides or whether it’s better than ours. He’s just whistling in the wind, like he always does.
The interesting thing about this is that shows yet again how little Trump knows about conservative ideology—and how little he cares about it. For years, conservatives have insisted that America has the best health care in the world. Just look at all those Canadians crossing the border for hip replacements! And the reason for our superiority is that we rely on the free market far more than most countries.
Trump just casually batted that away. Australia has a fairly common system cobbled together over the years, with taxes paying for basic universal health care and private insurance companies picking up the slack (sort of like Medigap insurance in the US for Medicare patients). It’s not especially generous, but it’s also about half the cost of American health care.
And Trump just said it’s better than the health care we get. Ditto for Britain’s fully socialized health care. Ditto for the Scandinavian countries. Ditto for France and Germany and Japan. Everyone with a government-funded universal health care system is better than us.
Normally, a statement like this would produce a huge blowback among conservatives. But not this time. That’s because conservatives all know that Trump has no idea what he’s saying, and no plans to let it guide policy. He’s certainly not planning to adopt the Australian model. Just the opposite: it’s little more than random babbling while he happily allows Congress to kill off the most Australian-ish aspects of American health care.