The facts are not in dispute. The United States spends more per person on medical care than any other country, and the gap is getting worse. The American Medical Care system leaves millions of its citizens uninsured, and it has the worst health outcomes of any wealthy country.
Medicare-for-All would cost less than the current system, and 70 percent of Americans support such a plan, according to a survey conducted in 2018.
“Medicare for All” is the term popularized by Senator Bernie Sanders and others to denote a universal health care plan in familiar language. “Medicare” is a useful term because it refers to a universal health care system—for seniors.
In other words, basic Medicare has two critical features of universal health care plans. First, everyone is covered, that is, everyone who is 65+ years of age or disabled. Second, the government is the insurer (for basic Medicare), and no insurance company is involved.
Another point about Medicare that I have used for years in arguing for a universal health care plan is against the misguided idea that the federal government cannot do anything successfully and efficiently. By that reasoning, it cannot run such a complicated thing as a universal health care system.
But the data say the opposite. There are more people on Medicare in the United States than live in Canada. Thus, our universal health care system is much larger than Canada’s. And it runs efficiently. The overhead for Medicare is consistently less than two percent, while the overhead of the current medical care “system” is 13 percent.
However, Medicare does not cover people younger than 65 years of age. The meaning and objective of Medicare for all are that Medicare would be extended to include everyone.
But there are objections to Medicare-for-All, two of which I will address here. One criticism is that the cost of universal health care—everyone is covered—is liberty. Mandating that everyone participates is seen as an infringement on individual rights. I suggest we discard that argument because it seems to be a means of having people unwittingly protecting their “liberty” by keeping a system that does not cover everyone and causes so much financial hardship—and even death.
The freedom argument is indeed, “Give me liberty or give me death.” With our current “liberty,” which keeps 28 million people uninsured, over 13,000 persons die needlessly every year—because they do not have medical insurance. All presumably so private interests can continue to make money on our illnesses.
This brings us to the issue of financial costs. The primary argument against Medicare-for-All is that it would cost too much, much more than the current (mess of a) system. However, numerous studies have shown that Medicare-for-All would cost less than the current system.
The overall costs to the government would go up, but the total amount of medical care expenditures would go down. In 2018, the libertarian Mercatus Center examined the Medicare-for-All approach. It surprisingly concluded that although the overall costs of medical care would increase to $32.6 trillion, the U.S. could insure 30 million more Americans, virtually eliminate out-of-pocket medical care expenses, and save $2 trillion over ten years in the process. Rather than paying premiums, deductibles, and copays for medical care, people will instead pay additional taxes that on average would be a bit less than they currently pay into the healthcare system and for those on lower incomes, a lot less.
Observers wondered about the Mercatus Center, which is funded by the Koch family, producing a report favorable to universal health care. Note; however, they unsurprisingly buried that discordant note about money savings in tables in the report and emphasized the $32.6 trillion increase for the media to jump on—and the media did. As a result the media serve the medical care industry by harping on the increased costs to the federal government and not taking into consideration the reduction of overall costs.
The bottom line is that Medicare-for-All saves money as well as lives.