Many of the left’s policy proposals come with the same design flaw: While sounding great on paper, they have little chance of working in practice. Monday brought one such type of reality check to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and supporters of single-payer health care, in the form of the annual Medicare trustees report. The report once again demonstrates Medicare’s shaky financial standing, as the retirement of 10,000 Baby Boomers every day continues to tax the program’s limited resources. So why would Sanders and Democrats raid this precariously funded program to finance their government takeover of health care?
For years, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has campaigned for what he calls “Medicare for All”—a proposal that would abolish private insurers and replace them with a “federally administered single-payer health care program” that would cover all forms of health care with “no more copays, no more deductibles,” and no premiums aside from substantially higher taxes. The irony of the proposal is that it looks nothing like the actual Medicare program that seniors use today. Indeed, the part of Medicare that is working best is Medicare Advantage, which deploys private insurers to provide high-quality, low-cost coverage to seniors. The best way to reform Medicare is to enact reforms that will further improve the quality and affordability of Medicare Advantage plans, and to learn from Medicare Advantage to improve the coverage that younger Americans can obtain.
Reports suggest President Trump is planning to release a health care reform plan soon. That’s good news. Republicans may have failed to pass reforms in 2017, but health care nonetheless remains a major concern for Americans. Since the failed reform effort in 2017, conservative health policy experts spent a lot of time working with colleagues across the country to develop a consensus proposal that could succeed where the previous effort fell short. It’s required some hard thinking about the lessons of previous efforts, as well as the failures of implementing Obamacare. This piece highlights seven lessons that will serve policymakers well in crafting the new plan.
Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., released a “2.0” version of his “Medicare-for-all” plan. The self-proclaimed socialist has long promoted the idea of universal health care, and in his latest version, he has found a way to expand his proposal even more to the left.
With each of the declared Democratic presidential candidates coming out in support of some expanded version of Medicare, one should ask, how much of Medicare is really in these plans? In researching the Sanders plan, one might find that there’s very little Medicare at all – as a matter of fact, as it relates to Medicare, it’s about marketing more than mechanics.
About 20 million Americans have gained coverage under ObamaCare since it was passed in 2010, but nearly 9 percent — 30 million people — still don’t have health insurance.
All Democrats running for president say they want to provide universal health care coverage to Americans. But they have different ideas about how to get there.
Here are the plans they keep talking about on the campaign trail and what they would do.
One feature of the political moment is that ideas that first appeared on the left (tariffs) are gaining support on the populist right. The latest example is a GOP plan in Florida to import prescription drugs from Canada, which is impractical, unsafe and unlikely to reduce prices at the pharmacy.
The Florida Legislature has been moving on a plan pushed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis that directs the state health agency to set up a prescription drug importation program. Other states like Colorado are pondering similar schemes, and Vermont is well along in setting one up.
Healthcare rationing is a regular part of the United Kingdom, which has nationalized healthcare in a way Democrats in America want to bring here.
But this rationing leads to consequences. Hundreds of elderly citizens go blind each year while waiting for eye surgeries. The latest report on the issue comes from the Times of London. The outlet reports that the latest survey from the Royal College of Ophthalmologists (RCO) found rationing of cataract surgery continues even after guidance was issued suggesting patients not have the surgery delayed.
Tennessee would dramatically overhaul how it provides health care to its lower-income and disabled residents under a proposal the House advanced Thursday.
The bill cleared the GOP-dominated chamber on party lines, with 68 Republicans in favor and 21 Democrats against.
It’s a proposal considered one of the top policy debates of the sessions, yet many in the minority party were visibly upset after being cut off from the debate and forced to cast a vote before all members had a chance to speak.
What is a more limited-government, pro-market (not simply pro-business) health policy reformer supposed to do? There are plenty of other short-term poses one might adopt. Accept a lot of givens as too politically difficult to challenge and then suggest quarter-way compromises that slow the pace of retreat. Or try procedural sidesteps that alter the venue of policy development (let the states do it!), without greater guarantees than what shuffling a somewhat altered deck of cards with a different set of political intermediaries offers. Or propose new tricks of manipulating magic money from somewhere else (reinsurance, reshuffled subsidies, formulaic reimbursement and benefit cuts) in the further away future.
It wasn’t so long ago that Bernie Sanders (I-VT) comfortably occupied the left flank of health care policy. His Medicare For All bill was sufficiently costly, coercive and utopian to set him apart from the pack.
Times have changed. When it comes to drug pricing, Bernie faces unexpected intruders on his left: Republicans.
In recent months, Bernie has yielded socialist turf to two Republicans of impeccable capitalist pedigree. First, it was President Trump, who last fall announced a plan to incorporate drug prices set by foreign governments into Medicare. Then Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) last week introduced a bill pegging U.S. retail prices for prescription drugs to those set by five foreign governments.