Rule of thumb: If a politician is avoiding answering a question, it’s usually because voters won’t like the answer.

In the case of New York Congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her socialist promises, the answer is so inconvenient to voters that she’s going to dodge, dive, dip, duck, and dodge any hard question that comes at her.

Platitudes are her answer, not answers.

Her “Medicare for all” position, for instance, has an answer so dissatisfying that Ocasio-Cortez has done her level best to tip-toe around the inconvenient truth that her pie-in-the-sky socialist program would be so expensive that it would crush the medical infrastructure we have and erect in its place a sub-par care system that would be forced to ration overly expensive medical care. It can’t work. She knows it, too, and the fact that she avoids answering the question is self-evident enough.

What she will tell you, though, is that it can happen if people just pay for it.

As reported by Fox News:

In an interview with Jorge Ramos last week, Ocasio-Cortez was asked how she would pay for the multi-billion dollar health care plan promoted by liberal lawmakers like Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Kamala Harris, D-Calif. Ramos noted critics say the the program would be “more expensive” than the current system, to which she answered that people would “just pay for it.”

“People often say, like, how are you going to pay for it and I find the question so puzzling because ‘How do you pay for something that’s more affordable? How do you pay for cheaper rent?’ You just pay for it,” she said. “We’re paying more now.”

Want to learn more about our fight for Medicare for All, student loan cancellation, embracing our immigrant communities & more?

Check out our stoop interview w/ Jorge Ramos on @ThisIsAmerica: https://t.co/BjZvWBFODb pic.twitter.com/ORV0DTxxWh

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 2, 2018

Does she have a wealth-creating magic wand we don’t know about?

Anyone with a surface-level understanding of how economics works would look at that sentence and feel the need to immediately take a shower to wash off all the stupidity that you were just soaked with.

Providing medical care for everyone in the United States, including those who don’t pay taxes for one reason or another, would become so expensive that taxes would have to be increased by leaps and bounds on those who do pay that it would cause financial problems for the middle class, where most of America resides, as well as burden the already highly taxed rich who provide the jobs.

On top of that, the quality of our healthcare would plummet, research would slow to a crawl, rationing would occur, and doctors would leave the profession due to it not paying enough as Adam Barsouk, a medical researcher at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute wrote in the Daily Caller:

These are the hidden costs of single-payer healthcare. If the “Medicare for All” program were to cut costs through centrally planned rationing, it would exacerbate the expected 130 thousand physician shortage, as well as increase wait times, decrease quality and perhaps even stoke xenophobic tensions. It could also impede us from finding life-saving cures.

As a cancer researcher, I witness the $200 billion dollars pharmaceutical companies invest globally towards research and development. Most of this research is undertaken in the United States.

If Sanders’ “Medicare for All” tried to cut reimbursements to pharmaceutical companies, global research spending could decline as much as 40 percent. As governments inevitably deem the incremental benefits of research not worth the price tag, they crush the dreams of generations of scientists, doctors and patients.

Herein lies the worst danger of single-payer healthcare: It attempts to put a dollar value on the human life. Those like Senator Sanders who want to nickel-and-dime American healthcare are choosing cost over quality and, in turn, efficiency over humanity. The former Soviet Union also disregarded the value of human life, to the point that hundreds of millions perished.

“Just pay for it,” isn’t exactly a solid way of explaining how we would pay for it. That would be like throwing someone who can’t swim into a pool, then upon them screaming for help, you responded: “just swim.”

On top of this massive increase on our spending, taxing, and strain on our medical system, Ocasio-Cortez still hasn’t told us how we would pay for all the other positions she holds either, such as free college for all.

That anyone takes this woman seriously is beyond confusing.