Are You Sure You Want Medicare for All?: New at Reason

Expanding existing government healthcare systems would also spread the reach of their already messy problems.

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.”

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