I am just very excited.
Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from
Vermont,
can't stop talking about Medicare For All
which he says will finally solve all of America's
health insurance problems.
In fact, creating a national single-payer
plan is a truly terrible idea
that will likely bankrupt the country,
drive down the rate of health-care innovation,
and not even really improve health outcomes.
Established in the late 1960s,
Medicare is the nation's health-insurance
program for people 65 and over.
It's also the single biggest driver of the
national debt.
Payroll taxes and premiums paid by beneficiaries
cover less than half the program's costs,
which are expected to double from $700 billion
a year to almost $1.4 trillion a year,
over the next decade.
Sanders has proposed a new payroll and income
tax to pay for his plan,
but it's not at all clear that such hefty
new taxes
would come close to covering its costs,
that's because we have no idea what the bill
will actually come to.
But this much we do know:
His home state of Vermont pulled the plug
on a less generous plan
that would have raised taxes even more.
For all the problems with the U.S. health
care system,
it sets the pace for innovation and new treatment
options
in a way that no single-payer system on the
globe does.
That's because innovators here can expect
to earn back the cost of developing new treatments
in a way that's foreclosed by most single-payer
systems.
They inevitably come with all sorts of price
controls
that discourage new products and services
and they also ration access to the same.
Does having health insurance mean you'll be
healthier?
That's the implicit promise of Bernie Sanders'
Medicare For All program—and Obamacare too.
But surprisingly, the evidence for this is
thinner than you might think.
The two big studies on the link between having
insurance and actual health—
suggest that merely having insurance doesn't
lead to better outcomes
for the vast majority of people.
Having insurance can relieve financial and
emotional stress,
but it's not exactly clear that it will leave
you physically better off.
All of which makes the case against expanding
Medicare to all.
If single-payer couldn't even make it out
of Bernie Sanders' Vermont,
there's no reason at all to try it on all
of America.
