COMMENTARY: Our country is a socialist democracy

Sen. Bernie Sanders is a Democratic Socialist candidate for president. Our state and nation are socialist democracies with a free-enterprise capitalist economy.

Corrupted political operatives and corporate-owned pundits are continuously assaulting candidate Sanders as a “Socialist” as if this is something bad or to be feared. Like all of the other 30 developed, industrialized nations, our nation is a socialist democracy. We differ only in degree, not kind. To better understand this important reality, study the dictionary definitions of “democracy,” “government” and “socialism.”

Any program or service owned, operated and funded by any level of government is a socialist program or service.

The following list is but a partial one of the many essential socialist programs and services we need and benefit from every day of our lives: Social Security; single-payer Medicare and Medicaid; Obamacare; public schools, colleges and universities; public streets and highways, including our interstate highway system; military services; judicial system; public safety programs; public parks, libraries and museums; civil-rights laws; environmental-protection laws; right-to-organize, worker safety and benefits laws; and many, many more.

Regardless of political party affiliation, every elected and appointed government employee is a socialist employee who works under government laws and regulations and whose salaries, expenses and benefit package is paid for by hard-working citizens’ tax funds. Democratic Socialist candidate Sanders wants public funding for our political candidates to remove the “For Sale” and “Sold” signs from the front of our People’s Houses of Government.

Candidate Sanders wants to not only maintain and fight the privatization of our socialist safety nets, but has specific sensible, doable, research-proven program and cost-effective plans to strengthen existing ones and add needed others. These aforementioned big-moneyed-owned political and media prostitutes scoffed when he said we need to learn from other socialist democracies like Denmark.

Here are some facts about Denmark. It is the top-rated nation in the world to do business in. They have an $18-an-hour minimum wage and have practically eliminated poverty. And you can buy a hamburger there for less than in our country. They provide free college, university and trade school higher education.

And like all other 30 socialist democracy developed nations, they provide universal health care coverage for every citizen with a single-payer health care system like the research-proven program and cost-effective single-payer Medicare-for-All system Senator Sanders has developed and will help enact for our nation.

If requested, I can send anyone brief summaries of 25 state and national single-payer research study findings that document the huge savings of candidate Sander’s single-payer, non-government-run Medicare-for-All health care coverage plan.

One comprehensive single-payer research study was accomplished in Delaware. These were supplied by the Physicians for a National Health Program (single-payer). Access their pnhp.org website to become competently informed about single-payer. We now have four very effective single-payer systems in our state and nation. They are Medicare, Medicaid, the VA health care system and TriCare for military personnel and retirees.

Each of these single-payer systems has an administrative/overhead cost of less than 2 percent compared to now 40 percent wasted by the totally unnecessary profit-making-broker private health insurance industry.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Floyd E. McDowell Sr. of Bear is chairman of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Delaware Health Security Coalition and the DEinformedvoters.org website. He can be reached at 302-832-2799 or via email at flydmcdwll@verizon.net.