Comments on Medicare-for-All

Elizabeth Warren’s plan to nationalize the health care system in the USA has a price tag of $52 billion according to her no-doubt reliable cost accounting.  She has claimed repeatedly that billionaires will pay all the taxes to pay for it.  The middle class will pay nothing, so she says.

The total wealth of American billionaires is estimated to be about $2.4 trillion.  If every last penny of that wealth were confiscated by Warren’s socialist government, the tax on the billionaires would cover about 4.6% of cost of the first 10 years of her Medicare-for-All program.  Now, mind you, who is then going to pay that same 4.6% of more of the next 10 year period of her Medicare-for-All?  When those American billionaires sell off all their assets to pay their confiscatory taxes, will those who buy up the assets manage them as well and generate as many jobs and as much GDP growth?

Other portions of the costs are to be paid by having the states transfer their Medicaid payments to the federal government.  Companies will have to turn over what they are paying into employee health plans to the federal government.  Companies will lose the ability to tune their health insurance costs to their industry, location, and profitability.  Many more companies will fail without this flexibility, causing a loss of jobs and a loss of GDP growth.  Still, these sums will fall far short of providing the $52 trillion costs of Warren’s plan.  Who do you think is going to make up the huge difference?

Both Warren and Sanders plans will shut down the private health insurance markets.  This means they will put 2 million Americans in that industry out of work.  Do either of their plans cost estimates include putting these 2 million Americans on unemployment insurance payouts and other welfare programs?  When 2 million Americans lose their jobs, how many will become alcoholics or other drug users?  How many will commit suicide in their despair and depression?  Have we learned nothing from the human disaster that occurred in part as Obama acted to destroy the coal mining industry and the jobs of those who transported coal, burned coal in power plants, and ran the retail and services industries of the towns that depended upon coal production?

Medicare-for-all will result in lower quality medical care for everyone.  Innovation, medical care giver training and intelligence, equipment, and facilities will all deteriorate more and more over time.  Bureaucrats will be in charge of deciding who will live and who will die.  And every American will lose the sole ownership of their minds and bodies.  When someone else gets to dictate how you will act to maintain your own mind and body, then you have lost your most critical property right.  You are no longer sovereign.  You are a slave.