May 30, 2023

Progressive Democrats are trying to reintroduce their Medicare-for-All plan, a bait-&-switch scheme to impose single payer surreptitiously. It is national financial suicide, medical death-by-queue, and end of American medical freedom called medical autonomy. 

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That is not hyperbole – it is simple fact. 

Avowed socialist Bernie Sanders along with Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Debbie Dingell (D-Michigan), as well as 14 senators and 110 members of the House of Representatives are seeking to resurrect H.R. 1384, the disastrous Medicare for All National Health Insurance Bill. They claim CoViD deaths showed the need to bring it back. Further, they assert 15 million Americans otherwise will lose Medicare coverage, that the bill would save $650 billion, lower drug costs, reduce administrative cost and hassle, and improve access to care. 

Every claim is false. 

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It is now clear the number of deaths directly attributable to CoViD was greatly inflated, but whatever the number, lack of insurance coverage played no role. National health insurance, viz., H.R. 1384, would thus have no impact.

There is absolutely no basis for the claim that 15 million will lose Medicare coverage. If not, why would patients need H.R. 1384?

The claim that Medicare-for-All will save money is falsehood, propaganda, or to use favored progressive phraseology, disinformation. Senator Sanders himself admitted the bill would cost $30 trillion to $40 trillion over ten years. An independent, objective financial analysis by Mercatus Institute projected a cost of $32.6 trillion over ten years.  For perspective, that means each year American taxpayers would pay an amount similar to the entire GDP of Japan ($4 trillion) just to fund these new expenses. 

Last year the U.S. spent $4.3 trillion on healthcare. Half went to pay for bureaucracy, i.e., two trillion “healthcare” dollars produced no care! 

There is no evidence for the assertion that H.R. 1384 would reduce administrative costs and hassle. To suggest that government bureaucracy is low cost, efficient, and user-friendly would be laughable if it weren’t so painful. The original application for Obamacare insurance was 21 pages long. Eventually, Washington proudly achieved a reduction to only 11 pages. The claim that Medicare-for-All would lessen physicians’ regulatory burden is easily refuted by citing the administrative nightmare doctors currently face when trying to get paid by a federal insurance program, Medicaid. 

The most egregious assertion about Medicare-for-All is that it would improve patients’ access to medical care. Nearly one third of U.S. physicians do not accept new patients with Medicaid insurance; in Texas, less than half do. After Obamacare was fully implemented, the average maximum wait time to see a primary care physician was 122 days. That’s four months to diagnose belly pain: gas, ulcer, or cancer. This author’s wife waited six months to discover her abdominal pain had progressed to inoperable pancreatic cancer.