Universal Healthcare in the US overruled by Big Pharma
I find it hard to believe a Harvard-trained attorney doesn't understand how federal healthcare dollars actually move. Cruz knows better, and that's what makes the performance so strange. States aren't laboratories when the funding streams are welded shut by federal law. Medicare is a federal tax that pays for a national program, and you can't just scoop that money into a California or New York pot because the state decided to go its own way.
The deeper problem is that universal healthcare was never designed to be a state-by-state experiment. The whole point of a single-payer system is pooling risk across a huge population, and a state is just too small a pool. Even if a blue state got every waiver it asked for, it would still be fighting the economics of scale that make national programs work.
I'd want to know what Cruz actually proposes, if anything, beyond the mockery. Because pointing at blue states and saying "you do it" while blocking every federal mechanism that would allow them to is a neat trick. It lets him claim the moral high ground without ever having to face the math.