On a recent episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, Tucker Carlson and Saagar Enjeti described Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign as “America first” and “literally Trumpian.”
Transcript
Saagar Enjeti: I watch his campaign now. It’s America First.
The amount of times he says he doesn’t—even when he talks about Israel, he says Israel is committing a genocide. But ultimately, I want to make sure that you don’t pay more for healthcare. I don’t want your tax dollars going abroad to fund this barbaric military. He stands in front of a giant American flag. It’s almost Trumpian in terms of a lot of—
Tucker Carlson: It’s literally Trumpian.
Saagar Enjeti: Exactly.
And so you see candidates like that, especially him. He will be the most interesting test case come November.
Tucker Carlson: Is he gonna win?
Saagar Enjeti: If I had to bet, which I don’t, I would probably bet that he’ll win.
Tucker Carlson: I would think so.
Saagar Enjeti: I think so too.
Tucker Carlson: Do you have any idea—not to fixate on poor Mike Rogers, who I know—but I mean, there’s no one who should be farther from a position of power than Mike Rogers.
Looking past the populist optics and the flag reveals a different story. El-Sayed’s platform is not America First or Trumpian.
The centerpiece is a promise of government-run healthcare from cradle to grave with no premiums, copays, or deductibles. That is a powerful slogan. But the math does not work without large tax increases. Funding a program of this size would require aggressive middle-class tax hikes.
Removing all costs for everyone in the country also explodes demand. When Washington sets a fixed price to control costs, the result is waiting lists, provider shortages, and rationing. Healthcare becomes political.
El-Sayed’s plan also extends coverage toward people in the country illegally. And covers sex changes and abortion for all. That turns American taxpayers into the funders of a multi-trillion-dollar magnet for illegal immigration.
This same approach shows up in his enforcement policy. He campaigns on abolishing ICE. Pulling people into the country with expansive federal benefits while dismantling the agency tasked with enforcing immigration law is a direct contradiction of a secure border policy.
El-Sayed can say “safe and secure border” on camera. The rest of the platform does the opposite.
First, he campaigns to abolish ICE. He has said that since 2018 and repeats it on the stump. He calls ICE a “paramilitary force,” says it “must be torn down,” and says the only way forward is to abolish it and “start from scratch.”
Second, he pairs that with legalization and benefits. El-Sayed wants ICE funding redirected into immigration courts and the legal infrastructure for a “clear pathway to citizenship.” He supports the Dream Act and has called for Medicare for All providing “full healthcare citizenship for every single person, no exceptions.”
In 2018 he argued Michigan should stop “discriminating” by documentation status and issue driver’s licenses to people here illegally. Benefits plus legalization plus weaker interior enforcement is a magnet.
Third, his older record shows how he sees the border. In a deleted 2021 post he asked “why we allow white supremacists to police our borders.” He treats American enforcement as racist.
Put the pieces together: advertise free cradle-to-grave care, extend that system toward people here illegally, abolish the main interior enforcement agency, and loosen the rules for who can get on the voter rolls. One policy pulls people in. The other keeps them here. The last one tries to put them on the ballot.
El-Sayed opposes the SAVE Act, which would mandate proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Instead, he backs federal automatic voter registration. That means the state puts you on the rolls when you turn 18 and updates your registration when you move. You do not fill out a separate voter form. You do not show proof of citizenship. The government does it for you.
Michigan already has election fraud problems, allows same-day registration and lets voters sign an affidavit instead of showing a photo ID. Adding his automatic system on top of that makes it harder to keep ineligible people off the rolls.
When you put the whole agenda together, the pattern is clear: pull people in with free benefits, weaken the agency that removes them, and loosen the rules for who can get onto the voter rolls.
Do not let the American flags fool you. El-Sayed’s policies mean a vast expansion of state power, massive tax hikes, taxpayer-funded health care that includes abortion and sex-change procedures for all, and a border policy that lets people in while making it harder to get them out
Abdul El-Sayed’s policies are anti-American. They are not Trumpian.
Under standard Medicare for All proposals that El-Sayed supports, the federal government would establish a national fee schedule and payment rates (often based on or around current Medicare rates) for providers and use tools like global hospital budgets. That is how the plan is designed to control prices instead of leaving them to private-insurer negotiations.
Fixed price means the government, not private insurers, decides how much doctors, hospitals, and other providers get paid for each service.
Global hospital budgets have real downsides. They cap total spending, so extra patients or extra care becomes a financial problem. Once the yearly lump sum is spent, the hospital has a strong incentive to slow down, delay care, reduce services, or find some other way to stay within the budget.
If more people show up than expected, or if cases are more expensive than planned, something has to give. That is the basic rationing problem.
They reward doing less, not doing better. Under fee-for-service, treating another patient generally generates additional revenue. Under a global budget, the hospital does not automatically receive additional money for every additional patient it treats.
That means another patient can become another expense the hospital has to absorb.
A global budget also cannot reliably distinguish between wasteful care and necessary care. The financial reward comes from spending less. A hospital saves money whether it eliminates an unnecessary test or simply provides fewer services.
That makes the system a blunt cost-control tool: reducing utilization is easy to measure, but making sure only unnecessary care disappears is much harder.
There is also a capacity problem. Under fee-for-service, adding another staffed bed can generate additional revenue. Under a fixed budget, another staffed bed can become another cost.
That can create pressure to keep fewer beds staffed, reduce capacity, or avoid expanding even when emergency departments are crowded and the surrounding population is growing.
Quality and access can suffer in practice. When hospitals operate under hard spending constraints, expensive services become obvious targets.
Hospitals can shorten stays, limit testing, reduce staffing, postpone elective procedures, or scale back services that lose money. Psychiatry, obstetrics, trauma care, rural emergency departments, and other costly services do not suddenly become unnecessary just because they are hard to fit into a budget.
Global budgets can also shift costs instead of eliminating them. If hospitals reduce admissions, testing, procedures, or outpatient services, patients do not stop needing care.
Some of that care simply moves somewhere else — to physicians, nursing facilities, home health providers, freestanding clinics, emergency departments, or other parts of the system.
Government can make one column of the healthcare budget look smaller without making the patient’s needs disappear.
Hospitals are also being held financially responsible for demand they cannot fully control. They cannot perfectly predict illegal immigration, a severe flu season, another outbreak, an aging population, a nearby hospital closing, an unexpected increase in births, or a sudden wave of patients needing expensive cancer drugs or advanced procedures.
The more rigid the spending cap, the greater the tension between staying inside Washington’s financial target and meeting actual medical demand.
The budget is often based on previous spending. That can protect hospitals that were already inefficient while squeezing hospitals that were efficient, growing, or suddenly serving more patients.
If the formula is built on historical costs, yesterday’s spending becomes tomorrow’s government-approved budget.
Innovation can become a casualty too. New technology, new treatments, robotic equipment, advanced imaging, additional operating rooms, expanded intensive-care capacity, and expensive new drugs all cost money.
A hospital trying to stay under a predetermined ceiling has an obvious reason to postpone investments whose immediate effect is to raise spending.
Capital spending presents the same problem. Large equipment purchases and building upgrades may come from a separate capital budget controlled by another government process. Politicians and regulators then decide which hospitals get the MRI, the new wing, or the extra ICU.
That does not eliminate scarcity. It just moves the decision.
Hospitals end up competing politically for permission to buy MRI machines, expand facilities, replace equipment, or modernize infrastructure.
Global budgets do not eliminate bureaucracy. They create a different one.
Someone has to decide how much money every hospital should receive, how much the budget should rise with inflation, how population growth should be counted, how new technology should be treated, whether unexpected patient volume deserves an adjustment, how new services should be funded, and what happens when one hospital gains patients while another loses them.
That turns healthcare financing into a continuous political negotiation. Hospitals have every incentive to lobby for larger budgets, favorable adjustments, special exemptions, and higher cost projections.
Gaming does not disappear. It just changes form.
Cream-skimming can remain a problem too. Expensive, medically complicated patients threaten a fixed budget far more than healthy patients with simple conditions.
That creates pressure to transfer difficult cases elsewhere, discourage costly patients from using certain services, or shift them to providers whose spending falls outside the hospital’s budget.
There is a deeper incentive problem: genuine efficiency and under-service can look the same on a spreadsheet.
A hospital that eliminates unnecessary procedures may come in under budget. So can a hospital that keeps fewer beds open, reduces staffing, delays expensive treatment, restricts access to specialists, or provides less intensive care.
That is why these systems need layers of quality measurements, access standards, monitoring, exceptions, and regulatory safeguards.
The need for those protections gives the game away. The financial incentive is to spend less, whether the cut is waste or needed care.
Reducing utilization is not the same thing as making healthcare more efficient. A government can boast that hospital spending stopped growing because fewer procedures were performed, fewer beds were available, or patients waited longer.
The spreadsheet looks better. That does not mean healthcare became cheaper to provide. It may simply mean less healthcare was provided.
The central problem is simple: medical demand is not fixed just because Washington fixes the budget.
A fixed annual pot does not eliminate scarcity. It puts a government-set ceiling on hospital spending and then gives hospitals a powerful incentive to stay beneath it.
When the number of patients, the severity of their illnesses, or the cost of treating them exceeds what was budgeted, something has to give: staffing, capacity, services, access, waiting times — or the budget itself.
Calling that “cost control” does not change what is being controlled. It is the amount of healthcare hospitals are allowed to provide with the money government has decided they should spend.
You think the national debt is high now. Wait until El-Sayed, DSA, and the rest of the Democratic Party get their way on healthcare and the border.
They want more migrants, more undocumented immigrants, and more refugees — and they want healthcare for all, including abortion and sex-change procedure for ALL. Surgery plus removal of the sex glands means lifelong hormones and monitoring, which will be added to the bill.
I wish Democrat voters would stop treating slogans as a realistic plan. “Healthcare for all” with no premiums, no copays, and no deductibles is never going to work in a country with 350 million people and nonstop immigrants coming in legally and illegally.
Stop believing the lies. Stop trusting the system you claim to hate. And stop putting the government in charge.
Stop letting Democrats buy your votes with other people’s money and promises of “free” healthcare.