But Medicare for All won't just make those costs and administrative burdens disappear. It will just shift them elsewhere—primarily to their employees.
Then instead of Medicare for all, how about Medicare for Anyone who wants it?
Currently, Medicare has four parts: Part A covers hospital stays, Part B pays for medical services, Part C pays for private insurance coverage, and Part D covers prescription drugs.
How about we create “Medicare Part E,” which covers “everybody.” Just let any citizen in the United States
buy into Medicare.
It would be so easy. There is no need to reinvent the wheel with the so-called “public option,” which would mean setting up a whole new program from the ground up. Medicare already exists. It works. Some people will like it; others won’t, just like the Post Office versus UPS.
Just pass a simple bill—it could probably be just a few lines, like when Medicare was expanded to include disabled people— that says that
any American citizen can buy into the program at a rate to be set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services that reflects
the actual cost for us to buy into it.
Thus, Medicare Part E would be revenue neutral!
To make it available to people with a low income, Congress could raise the rates slightly for all currently noneligible people to cover the cost of subsidizing families that live below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Revenue neutral again.
This would blow up all the rumors about “death panels” and “pulling the plug on Grandma” and everything else: everybody knows what Medicare is.
And nobody would be forced to enroll in Medicare. Those who scorn it and think of it as “socialized medicine” can continue give their hard-earned pay to United Healthcare so that it can pay its CEO $744 million in stock options. Those who like Medicare can buy into Part E.
Explain the downside.