New York Times Trashes Single-Payer Healthcare (Covers Cost w/out Acknowledging Savings)

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http://pubrecord.org/commentary/5405/times-trashes-single-payer-healthcare

New York Times Trashes Single-Payer Healthcare

By Dave Lindorff
The Public Record
Sep 21st, 2009

In an article in the Sunday New York Times, headlined “Medicare for All? ‘Crazy,’ ‘Socialized’ and Unlikely,” reporter Katherine Q. Seelye did her best to damn the idea of government insurance for all with faint praise.

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Never has the Times really analyzed the true costs and benefits of the plan espoused in a bill, HR 676, authored by House Judiciary Chair John Conyers, D-MI, which would expand Medicare to cover every American. Seelye mentions Rep. Conyers’ bill, but says innocently that it is “going nowhere” in the House. In fact, his bill, despite having been co-sponsored by 86 members of the House, has been blocked from getting a public hearing in committee by Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership, at the behest of the Obama White House, which is dead-set against a single-payer reform of health care.

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Seelye quotes economist Skinner as claiming that Medicare expansion to cover every American would mean a tripling of the Medicare payroll tax—currently set at 2.9 percent of wages. But even if we accepted Skinner’s math, it is meaningless without looking at the savings side.

Sure expanding Medicare would mean higher Medicare taxes, but what about the following:

• Medicaid, the program that pays for medical care for the poor, and is funded by federal and state taxes, would be eliminated, saving $400 billion a year.
  Veterans’ care, currently running at $100 billion a year, would be eliminated.
  
  
• Perhaps two-thirds of the $300 billion a year spent by federal, state and local governments to reimburse hospitals for so-called “charity care” for treatment of people who have no insurance but don’t qualify for Medicaid, would be eliminated.
  
  
• Individuals and employers would no longer have to pay for private insurance.
  
  
• Several hundred billion dollars currently spent on paperwork by private insurers would be eliminated.
  
  
• Car insurance would be cheaper as there would no longer have to be coverage for medical bills.
  
  
• Federal, state and local governments would no longer have to pay to insure public employees.

In short, if every person were on Medicare, the overall savings would overwhelm the small increase in the Medicare payroll tax of 5.8 percent. The bottom line is that Canadians, who have Medicare for all, devote 10 percent of GDP to health care. Americans, who have private-insurance-based health care except for the elderly, devote 17 percent of GDP to health care.

Seelye and the Times have never mentioned any of this. Neither does President Obama or the Democratic Congress.

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