Medicare-For-All is such a terrible idea it should be called Ruinous-For-All. It would be ruinous for both the average person’s budget and everyone but the wealthy’s health.
The reason it would be ruinous to a family’s budget is simple: the government has no concept of cost-control. Only politicians would see a budget increase as a cut in budget! How do they do that? Suppose that a department’s current budget is $1,000 (I know that amount is ridiculous, but it’s just an example). In the new budget year the department requests a 5% increase to $1,050. By the time congress is finished, they only grant a 4% increase – to $1,040. What gets reported in the media? We’re slashing that departments budget! In private enterprise slashing a budget actually means that department would get less than $1,000 for the new year – not more!
Tie that in with what makes a bureau or department powerful in government: their span-of-control (i.e. people) and the amount of their budget, that’s what. So, the average bureaucrat sees their power and authority grow when their headcount and/or budget grows. It matters little to the bureaucrat whether the money is needed or not, they’ll find a way to spend it. In private enterprise, managers are rewarded for reducing cost or increasing production. If they can do both they are doubly rewarded; it’s literally just the opposite in government.
How does that affect your budget? Simple, the money must come from somewhere; either taxes or delayed taxes (i.e. deficit spending). One way or the other, the money’s coming out of your pocket. Current estimates put Medicare-For-All at $10,000 annually per PERSON – not household, not taxpayer, but per person. That means a family of four would pay about $40,000 a year in taxes to support this monstrosity.
And, speaking of cost, did you know that current Medicare and Medicaid budgets are set with a specific percent of waste and fraud built in (totaling billions of dollars)? If a private insurer simply built-in costs for waste and fraud they’d be prosecuted by the very government that manages itself that way.
So, your healthcare costs would skyrocket to deal with paying for the massive bureaucracy needed to manage the program and the huge amounts that would be siphoned by criminals.
It would be ruinous to your health because of how bureaucracies work.
First, remember everything in a bureaucracy is about budget and bureaucrats set very detailed and specific line items within their budgets. So, Medicare may set a budget that will pay for 1,000 knee replacements in a fiscal year. When that number is reached, no more knee replacements. It doesn’t matter whether the 1,000 were reached in the first fiscal month or the last: replacement 1,001+ will simply have to wait until the following year. Yes, there will be a process to request an override – but this is the government you’re talking about. That process will take many, many weeks, if not months. And it won’t even be medical people reviewing the request – i.e. those who would know whether the request is legitimate; it’ll be low-level bureaucrats who will have the authority to deny any medical procedure they want. If private insurers did that, they’d be either sued in to bankruptcy or prosecuted for malfeasance.
Second, it will cripple the medical community due to lack of trained medical personnel. Again, it has to do with budgets. Bureaucrats won’t ask providers to submit invoices for payment so that they can pay them. They won’t meet with providers to discuss the costs and reimbursement rates for any procedures; they’ll simply come at them with a book that contains two massive parts: what they’ll pay for any given procedure, and; all the paperwork required by them for any and every diagnosis made, recommendation made, and procedure performed (some of this is happening now under the current laws and regulations passed under the Affordable Care Act).
Because Medicare-For-All will cause providers to operate with severe cost constraints, most doctors will simply leave the profession for greener pastures and fewer people will want to enter the field at all – why spend a dozen years in schooling and training and thousands of dollars for a relatively low paying job.
Those practitioners that stay will spend gobs of time simply filling out government forms and have less time to handle their increased caseload.
Think that these two things are hyperbole or simply inaccurate? Study the government-run programs anywhere in the world and this is exactly what you’ll find.
Also, you will find that most countries with the equivalent of Medicare-For-All have private insurers. Why? Because the government run programs typically don’t cover everything and people need private insurers to fill in the gaps. So why have a government run program at all?
It also creates a bifurcated system of great healthcare for rich people and poor healthcare for everyone else. Wealthy people will still be able to afford whatever they want or need for healthcare. The best example of how the wealthy people think about health insurance is Ellen DeGeneres: when commenting about coverage she said “I think I may have insurance, I don’t know” (check her episodes from the week of Sept., 21st, 2019). To her, and the rest of the wealthy, healthcare cost is an incidental cost – not something to be concerned about. Wealthy folks will simply pay private doctors outrageous fees for care.
Getting the government more involved with healthcare is NOT the answer. Having less government involvement is.
See the Part 3 for my solutions to the issues: