@seawulf575 “Let’s start with the title of the program “Medicare for All”. It isn’t. Your own article states very clearly that the plan “for all” would only cover another 30M people. Add that to the 64M already on Medicare and you come up to 94M. There are 335M people in the country. So what about the other 240M people? Part of the basket of deplorables that aren’t worth anything to a Dem?”
I think there’s some confusion going on. It’s adding all people who currently have any health coverage and then 30M additional people to that. What Medicare for all means is that people like me who have a private health insurance plan from companies like Aetna, Cigna, Anthem, etc, will instead have Medicare. We’re going to be paying a pretty similar amount in additional taxes to what we’re currently paying in premiums, with the added benefit of no copays or deductibles.
Regarding the financing here’s one breakdown:
“Sanders’s vision for financing Medicare-for-all includes raising employer-side payroll taxes by 7.5 percentage points in order to raise roughly $3.9 trillion over 10 years.
On average, this is less than what employers are currently spending on premium contributions for their employees, so workers and employers should generally come out ahead under this system. But those broad averages mask a wide range of impacts.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average employer contribution for a single person’s health insurance in 2016 was $5,946. Sanders’s employer-side payroll tax would be less than that for workers earning below $80,000 a year but higher for more affluent workers. For family coverage, the average employer contribution was $14,561 which would make the cutoff point about $194,000 in household income.
On the other hand, lower income households, who currently don’t get employer-sponsored health insurance, could find themselves getting very robust coverage in exchange for a very modest tax increase. Some low-income families are already getting free insurance from the government through Medicaid — those families might end up seeing a small reduction in take-home pay in order to swap one government insurance plan for another.
Of course, even families whose take-home pay diminished somewhat due to Sanders’s payroll tax would reap benefits in the form of eliminating co-payments and deductibles. The point is that while the structure of Sanders’s plan is broadly progressive and broadly beneficial to most households, the exact calculus of who ends up ahead and who does not hinges on a complicated set of factors.” (Source)
We have plenty of waits in our current system, and I’ve got plenty of horror stories with regards to private insurers from my time as an admin of a private surgical practice, including one insurer that wanted us to do surgery that involved inserting a catheter into a patient’s vein and heating it up to just below boiling without anesthesia to save them about a thousand bucks. Or patients who submit for pre-approval for procedures, get approved. have the surgery and then are denied coverage retroactively and are stuck with huge bills (this is a common practice).The US consistently ranks way below universal healthcare systems globally and we pay the most per capita.
Composing members:
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