“Medicare for All” Remains a Terrible, Terrible Idea

Last December I had the opportunity to have a radio debate with two supporters of Medicare for All, which (in many of its proposed iterations) would eliminate private insurance entirely and replace it with a government-run plan. Competition is a much better and more reliable path to progress in reducing costs and increasing access for patients, and like I said during that discussion:

Moving from a system . . . [that has] 1000 of something to one of something sounds a lot like a monopoly, and monopolies don’t always work in consumer interests.

The sheer cost of a Medicare for All program would dwarf our current federal spending levels and require massive new taxes on Americans. The Atlantic reports:

The Urban Institute, a center-left think tank highly respected among Democrats, is projecting that a plan similar to what [two candidates] are pushing would require $34 trillion in additional federal spending over its first decade in operation. That’s more than the federal government’s total cost over the coming decade for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined, according to the most recent Congressional Budget Office projections.

In recent history, only during the height of World War II has the federal government tried to increase taxes, as a share of the economy, as fast as would be required to offset the cost of a single-payer plan, federal figures show. There are “no analogous peacetime tax increases,” says Leonard Burman, a public-administration professor at Syracuse University and a former top tax official in both the Bill Clinton administration and at the CBO. Raising that much more tax revenue “is plausible in the sense that it is theoretically possible,” Burman told me. “But the revolution that would come along with it would get in the way.”

Health care providers, health insurers and pharmaceutical companies are not always “good guys” in our health care system, but they compete with one another, which serves consumer interests. Policymakers should go much further in compelling such competition and preventing these industries from leveraging government for their own interests. But Medicare for All goes in the very opposite direction—monopolizing control of our health care system, reducing choice and trusting government to provide these services instead.

It was a bad idea last year. And it is still a bad idea this year.