Lee Ritz, MD (Ob/Vee/Us)

Hasan Piker admitted he wasn’t familiar with Vermont’s failed attempt at single-payer when Ezra Klein of the New York Times brought it up on Friday. That ignorance was blatantly apparent. Piker had just called single-payer “the only solution.” Klein asked what happened when Vermont tried it. Piker said he didn’t know the example. Klein then explained how the plan collapsed once the real costs became visible. Employer contributions that had been hidden in private insurance turned into direct taxes. Vermont abandoned Green Mountain Care in 2014 after state analysis showed it would require an 11.5 percent payroll tax and income taxes as high as 9.5 percent. Governor Shumlin killed it, warning the tax increases risked economic shock. That exchange matters. Piker pushes Medicare for All as the obvious fix while showing he hadn’t even looked at the closest U.S. attempt to do something similar. Whether he was genuinely unfamiliar or just unprepared, the result is the same: the details that sank the Vermont plan never entered Piker’s argument until someone else supplied them. He was left silenced because his narrative has already failed. Single-payer keeps running into the same problem. The money doesn’t appear. It gets shifted from employers and insurers onto taxpayers in plain view, and voters notice. Vermont’s Democratic governor had the votes and still walked away once the numbers were clear. That isn’t a right-wing talking point. It’s what happened when a state actually tried it. Piker makes his living telling people the socialist system will work this time despite never having before, not even recently. The Vermont example is public record. Not knowing it, or not addressing it until pressed, completely undercuts his pitch. His ideas stay popular in his audience. The record of implementing unsuccessfully does not. Piker counts on his followers being unaware of the proof of why Medicare for All doesn’t work. They oblige and he keeps them in the dark.