This Attack on Sanders' Medicare-for-All Plan is Ridiculous

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/10/attack-sanders-medicare-all-plan-ridiculous

The Urban Institute and the Tax Policy Center today released analyses of the costs of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ domestic policy proposals, including single-payer national health insurance. They claim that Sanders’ proposals would raise the federal deficit by $18 trillion over the next decade.

We won’t address all of the issues covered in these analyses, just single-payer Medicare for all. To put it bluntly, the estimates (which were prepared by John Holahan and colleagues) are ridiculous. They project outlandish increases in the utilization of medical care, ignore vast savings under single-payer reform, and ignore the extensive and well-documented experience with single-payer systems in other nations - which all spend far less per person on health care than we do.

The authors’ anti-single-payer bias is also evident from their incredible claims that physicians’ incomes would be squeezed (which contradicts their own estimates positing a sharp rise in spending on physician services), and that patients would suffer huge disruptions, despite the fact that the implementation of single-payer systems elsewhere, as well as the start-up of Medicare, were disruption-free.

We outline below some of the most glaring errors in the Holahan analysis (which served as the basis for Tax Policy Center’s estimates) regarding health care spending under the Sanders plan.


2,000 Doctors Agree With Bernie Sanders on Universal Health Care

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35971-doctors-agree-with-bernie-sanders-on-universal-health-care

Why do you think there would be no additional government spending if the United States has a single-payer health care plan? Countries such as Canada and the England run their national health program on the backs of taxpayers. Will that happen in the United States as well? Can it be done without raising taxes?

There would be additional government spending with a single-payer plan, but this would be offset by the elimination of spending by individuals and employers on premiums, co-payments, and deductibles. We can expand coverage to everyone in the country and eliminate co-payments and deductibles, and at the same time keep overall current health care spending roughly unchanged.

Your proposal calls for a single-payer health care plan for the United States. Obamacare has helped 16.9 million people become newly insured. Would it not be less disruptive to expand the provisions in the ACA instead of repealing the law and replacing it?

The U.S. health system is highly disruptive as things stand now. You're liable to lose your insurance at any time -- for instance, if you change your job or get divorced. Similarly, those purchasing plans on the "marketplaces" may find that they can keep down premium increases by changing plans on an annual basis. Every time your insurance plan changes, you may need to change all of your doctors and hospitals in order to stay "in network." This is enormously disruptive to people's health care. In contrast, in a single-payer system, everyone has free choice of doctors and hospitals.

[silvershadow]

1. This whole primary has been rather ridiculous. nt

[Baobab]

3. The fact is, we've known that the insurance system was failing us since 1992, the last year when a

1992 was the last year that a majority of US wage earners could afford adequate non-group health insurance!

Obamacare (Hillarycare too) are basically rearranging deck chairs on a Titanic of bad policy-

a long chain of almost identical failures of state and now national "solutions" all have failed for the same reasons.


Shhhh!

[HereSince1628]

2. Riduclous...to be worthy of ridicule, like all arguments that leave out half the information

Completely ignore savings and consider the shifting of the cost to be new additional costs.

This is hardly the first time this sort of thinking was applied to Sanders medicare for all approach.

But it -is- a primary season and the goal of the establishment is to stop Sanders, so they keep it going and talking of unicorns and flying ponies.