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[Saints News] Opinion: Is "Medicare For All" A Good Idea?


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Bernie Sanders, US Senator from Vermont, Presidential Candidate, and Vocal Proponent of "Medicare for All" [New York Times]


Opinion: Is "Medicare for All" A Good Idea?

 

Ryan D Price

 

Vermont is one of the wealthiest (per capita) and smallest states in the Union. It’s also the state that Democratic Socialist darling Bernie Sanders has represented in Congress for the past twenty-eight years. In the small, wealthy state of Vermont, a bill was passed by its  State Legislature in 2011. It was called H 202, or “Single-Payer and Unified Health System”. This law, which was enacted in the state, creating “Green Mountain Care”. This taxpayer-funded healthcare pool was meant to provide universal healthcare coverage for all of Vermont’s citizens. The kicker was that it was also expected to reduce healthcare costs. It all sounded wonderful.


Fast forward to 2013. Under the provisions of the law, Vermont was supposed to have, by this time, figured out how to fund the thing. They hadn’t. An 11% payroll tax hike was proposed, but this was - naturally - determined to be unfair and even crippling to small businesses in the state. By 2014 the state had still not figured out how to fund the law with the $2 billion in additional state spending it required. The law was abandoned by the state.

 

What happened? Two-thirds of Vermont’s citizens agreed that even if it meant a tax-hike, they wanted universal healthcare. The people felt ready to pay up for the collective good of their state. Reality set in though. That’s what happened.


A line touted by opponents of single-payer healthcare is simple - nothing is actually free. This is important, especially today, as we hear the terms “free healthcare” and “free college” being thrown around. It’s easy to say that we can tax the rich to Hell to pay for these things. It feels good. It feels like the right thing to do. However, it’s just not how things work.


A national “Medicare for all” plan, like the plans touted by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, would establish a costly and ineffective government bureaucracy overseeing all aspects of our healthcare system. Let’s take a second to think about that. The Federal Government, along with its low approval ratings and generally accepted inability to govern effectively, would be in full control of the entirety of our healthcare system. That doesn’t sound like a good idea to me, and you can take a quick look at the failures of the Veteran’s Affair’s healthcare system for reference.


Then comes the other issue. How do we fund this? “Medicare for all” would cost the Fed over $32 trillion in its first ten years. Let’s take a shot in the dark here. Let’s say we doubled the corporate tax rate as well as the individual income tax rate. Obviously a 100% increase in taxing would cover this, right? No. It’d fail to cover the expense of this program.


These programs don’t work on the state level once the invoice hits the desk. They’re great to think about, and well-intentioned. But the reality of the situation is that they can’t feasibly be funded in the United States - whether it be at the State or Federal level - without crippling our economy. If a doubling of corporate and individual income tax - something I think most voters would not get behind - can’t cover something, then the writing is on the wall. “Medicare for all” is a dud that would never be enacted even if it passed in the house and senate and was signed into law. Just like Vermont, the cost would come in, and the plan would fail. Focusing on other common sense ways to reduce already existing healthcare costs is the way to go here - not a wholesale handover to the Federal Government with all of us expected to foot the bill. 

 

 

The opinions expressed in this piece do not reflect those of Saints News as a whole, but those of its author Ryan D. Price.
 

Saints News

 

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21 minutes ago, borhoi said:

“Medicare for all” would cost the Fed over $32 trillion in its first ten years.

Username: NGC6543

Comment: That's 3.2 trillion per year on average. Funny, private insurance healthcare cost american people 3.65 trillion in 2018 alone (source: Axios), with an increase of 5.5% per year over the next years (source: Health Affairs journal). So counting the increase, over the next 10 years the private insurance system we have would cost 46.87 trillion. Look at that shit, we'd even save money, how great is that? Very convincing article. 

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