If California couldn’t figure out how to pay for it, heck, if little Vermont couldn’t figure out how to pay for it, how will Los Federales pay for it?
(Reason)  Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) plans to unveil his long-awaited “Medicare for all” proposal for government-controlled, single-payer health care. His colleague, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), is all-in on the scheme. “Medicare for All is one way that we can give every single person in the country access to high quality health care,” she writes. “Everyone is covered. Nobody goes broke paying a medical bill. Families don’t have to bear the costs of heartbreaking medical disasters on their own.”
And for starting us along the path to all of that high-quality care, she adds, “We owe a huge debt to President Obama.”
Well, there is something there. Debt, that is. Huge, accumulating mounds of it, swamping everything in sight. In 2001, the Congressional Budget Office warned that spending on retirees—specifically Social Security and Medicare—”will consume…almost as much of the economic output in 2030 as does the entire federal government today.”
“Notwithstanding recent favorable developments,” the Medicare Trustees conceded in their report this year, “current-law projections indicate that Medicare still faces a substantial financial shortfall that will need to be addressed with further legislation.” The report foresees that “the trust fund becomes depleted in 2029.”
Realistically, we’re looking at a minimum of $48 trillion ($48,000,000,000,000) in unfunded liabilities for Medicare. Lots of Democrats, especially the newer ones like Kamala Harris (Brokifornia), are super enthused by this. Oh, and fewer and fewer doctors and health practices are accepting patients on Medicare. Will the Medicare for all scheme force doctors/health facilities to accept it?
A big part of the problem, as Cato’s Tanner pointed out earlier this year is that “Americans want widely contradictory things from health-care reform. They want the highest-quality care for everyone, with no wait, from the doctor of their choice. And they want it as cheap as possible, preferably for free.”
Promising, as Sanders and Warren do, to give everybody high-quality health care without regard for ability to pay will always find an enthusiastic audience. But delivering on that promise is likely to give us not the illusion of Medicare for All, but rather its awful, unsustainable reality.
And, how does Government pay for it? It should be amusing to see their math. If they even bother. California didn’t even bother attempting to figure out a way. They just spiked it.
