Category: Medicare-for-All

Medicare-for-All Part II: A Risk Assessment

Medicare-for-All Part II: A Risk assessment published on LinkedIn August 30, 2019.

There are substantial obstacles to MFA becoming law, which render MFA a high-risk proposition that could crowd out more moderate legislative proposals, include:

  1. Elimination of Private Health Insurance (Sec. 107), an industry that represents more than 6 % of our Gross Domestic Product.
  2. The Freedom of Choice (Sec. 103) provision which would most likely compromise quality and increase the cost of care.
  3. Elimination of managed care, the most proven method of controlling cost and quality of care.
  4. Eroding public support evidenced by multiple public opinion polls exploring MFA’s specifics.
  5. Legislative risk that MFA could never be enacted and build opposition to multi-payer proposals.
  6. Implementation risk: Failure to properly implement an extremely ambitious makeover of the health insurance market could lead to years of chaos.
  7. Underfunding/Rationing of Care because Congress would have complete control of the national healthcare budget.

And there is considerable evidence that a multi-payer system, common in Europe, performs better than single payer systems and is a better fit for the American market.

Medicare-for-All Part III: Assessing the Alternatives published

This article compares Medicare-for-All with several alternatives including a public option, Medicare Extra for All, the Healthy America Program (revised) and Medicare Advantage for All using six criteria, such as universality of coverage, affordability, per capita costs and implementation time-frame. It concludes with seven recommendations, most notably nationalization of Medicaid and substantial changes to the way healthcare is organized and reimbursed.  Published at LinkedIn

See also
Medicare-for-All Part II: A Risk assessment &
Medicare-for-All Part I: Financial Analysis