| Medicare, as President Lyndon B. Johnson put it, is a “light of hope” for elderly Americans. Medicare for All proposals threaten to extinguish it. Medicare for All would break a sacred promise and harm seniors’ access to care by forcing a system designed to support them to take on every other American. They deserve a system that helps them get well, not get in line. As for your taxes, the question isn’t whether Medicare for All would raise them, but by how many tens of trillions. And the monetary cost of Medicare for All is surpassed by its moral cost. The plan would strip coverage from more than 180 million Americans and force them into government insurance. |
The 2020 presidential race will pit the Democrats’ “Medicare for All” proposal against the Trump administration’s “Medicare for Less.” At least that’s how the Washington Post and some Democratic political operatives suggest it will play out. According to Post, progressives are looking to make political hay out of the contrast between their dream of enlarging the Medicare program to cover all 327 million Americans and a Trump budget that proposes to reduce Medicare spending. “Free” medical care vs. pushing granny off the cliff. On closer examination, most of the Medicare savings contained in the president’s budget would likely save beneficiaries money.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker claims Medicare for All would “save lives.” Vermont’s own Senator Bernie Sanders promises it would end “the disgrace of tens of thousands of Americans dying every year from preventable deaths.”
But a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds little evidence to support those assertions. The authors examined people who gained government health coverage in recent years and found no “statistically significant pattern of results consistent with . . . mortality changes.”
The Trump administration slammed “Medicare for All” in its annual economic review Tuesday, claiming thatcreating a new government-run health care program would be expensive, damage the economy and hurt Americans’ health.President Donald Trump and his top health officials have repeatedly blasted Medicare for All, which several Democratic presidential candidates and lawmakers are backing.”M4A will be neither more efficient nor cheaper than the current system, and it could adversely affect health,” said the report, which is prepared by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, using a shorthand acronym for the proposed reform.
As House Democrats sit down to draft their vision of governance in the coming weeks, lawmakers find themselves badly divided.
Centrists from swing districts, with the tacit support of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, favor incremental moves to shore up the Affordable Care Act and to lower the out-of-pocket costs of prescription drugs and medical care. They are pushing a variety of measures, such as shutting down cheap, short-term insurance plans that do not cover pre-existing medical conditions and allowing people to buy into Medicare at age 50 or 55.
But they are butting up against an aggressive and expanding group of more than 100 outspoken Democrats — as well as at least four of the party’s presidential candidates — who want to upend the whole system with a single government insurance plan for all Americans — the old concept of single payer, now called Medicare for all.
Eliminating profit from an entire sector of the national economy would be unprecedented. But the example of New York, on a smaller scale, shows why it is a recipe for dysfunction.
The Empire State’s hospital industry has been 100% nonprofit or government-owned for more than a decade. It’s a byproduct of longstanding, unusually restrictive ownership laws that squeeze for-profit general hospitals. The last one in the state closed its doors in 2008.
A report last year from the Albany-based Empire Center shows the unhappy results. The state health-care industry’s financial condition is chronically weak, with the second-worst operating margins and highest debt loads in the country. And there’s no evidence that expunging profit has reduced costs. New York’s per capita hospital spending is 18% higher than the national average.
“Medicare for All” may sound good to some Americans until they take a closer look at how it would actually work.
Take something pretty basic: how it would affect the number of medical professionals we have in this country. “Medicare for All” would drive out many doctors and nurses and compromise the accessibility and quality of medical care for millions of Americans.
First, she douses progressives’ impeachment dreams in cold water, telling the Washington Post that such a divisive and drastic political step should only be taken over egregious criminality that’s “compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan.” She cagily adds, “he’s just not worth it,” a personal swipe at the president, likely deployed to placate Trump haters who will bristle at her stance. Insulting him is a little wink that she’s still ‘on the team.’ But even if the hard-Left wing of the party is willing to forgive Pelosi’s hesitant posture on impeachment, how might they react to her intense fiscal skepticism on ‘Medicare for All’ — the holy grail of the statist agenda?
But he warned that how such a system would work — and who would pay for it — are big questions that have yet to be answered.
“For me, I think it’s a great opportunity for the industry to be able to expand the population that it’s coordinating care with,” Broussard said Tuesday at the Barclays Global Healthcare Conference in Miami Beach, Fla.
Left-wing Democrats in Congress have decided on a new version of “Medicare for All.” Turns out its going to be nothing like the Medicare program seniors are used to. What they have in mind is what we see in Canada.
Everyone (except American Indians and veterans) will be in the same system. Health care will be nominally free. Access to it will be determined by bureaucratic decision making.