Exploding the "Fiscal Conservative" Myth; Medicare-for-All's Huge Savings of $42 billion to $743 billion Opposed By Republicans!

Universal health care has saved other countries billions while insuring everyone, yet Republicans can’t wrap their ideologically limited minds around the benefits.

Well, we finally have the definitive CBO study, with 5 different scenarios. I’ve written a lot about health care in the past, but nothing like this have been done researched so thoroughly. Thankfully, because Trump’s daily disasters out of the way, this has surfaced. Now we know. 

The most exhaustive study on Medicare for All just came out (n Dec.). The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released an estimate of the cost of implementing a single-payer health insurance program in the United States. Its conclusion: a single-payer system would guarantee health insurance to all people while reducing overall health spending by hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

1. The CBO answered these questions for four different single-payer designs and found that a single-payer system would save $42 billion to $743 billion in 2030 alone.

2. The CBO option that most closely approximates current Medicare for All proposals is Option 3, which features low payment rates and low cost-sharing. That option produces $650 billion of savings in 2030. Adding Long Term Service and Supports to that option, which also approximates what many current Medicare for All proposals do, looks like it would bring the savings down to around $300 billion.

3. Medicare for All advocates have historically pointed towards the 2 percent administrative costs of traditional Medicare as what we should expect in a Medicare for All system. Yet, private Medicare Advantage plans have a similarly sick and elderly enrollment population, but manage to spend a whopping 13.7 percent of their revenue on administrative expenses. Thus, the payer administrative costs we could expect under single-payer are not the 6 percent touted by Urban and Mercatus. They are not even the 2 percent of the traditional Medicare program. Rather, they are more like 1.5 to 1.8 percent. These other estimates are therefore missing hundreds of billions of dollars of savings per year on this item alone.

4. The barriers to the policy are not technical deficiencies or costs, but rather political opposition from Republicans and conservative Democrats who would rather spend more money to provide less health care.

A former liberal radio talk host who likes to ask the “follow-up question” at Democurmudgeon.blogspot.com