The editors of the Washington Post are wary about “Medicare for All”:
Predicting wildly low spending levels is just one of the questionable maneuvers required to make Mr. Sanders’s plan look feasible. One must also make very favorable predictions about achievable administrative savings and lower drug costs. And one must accept the notion that not even the super-rich should have to pay a penny for health-care. Mr. Sanders’s plan would be more affordable, discourage unnecessary health-care spending and reserve federal resources for other priorities if he demanded co-pays of upper-income people.
One also should not discount another salient fact: Such disruptive reform of the health-care system would require a national consensus to dramatically expand the government that is not foreseeable even under a hypothetical Sanders presidency. There are ways to cover everyone with far less disruption.
I have posted on this subject to death. The workability of the plan depends on your assumptions. Supporters of Medicare for All assume cost savings based on the experience in other countries. But the federal government already administers one of the world’s largest single-payer systems (Medicare) and we have a form of single-payer in education. Controlling costs has not been the strength of either system.
Who will enforce cost control? It won’t come about without enforcement. It certainly won’t be the Congress. They have exhibited exactly no will to control costs. Patients, hospitals, physicians? Attorneys? There are too many people making too much money to let the punch bowl be taken away willingly.
