Letter: Medicare For All will cost us money we don’t have

Recently there have been a few letters mentioning the policy of Medicare For All that some primary candidates had in their platforms. Now that the primaries are over, I will try to explain how this concept has always been a fantasy of the left for many reasons.

At a high level people, who live in the U.S. get their medical care from six basic sources: 1) Employer-provided (the source for over 150 million people under 65) where the company and employee share the cost of care. 2) Medicare for those over 65. These benefits were paid for (at least in part) over the course of a lifetime via salary withholding and cover roughly 80 percent of medical needs. 3) Medicaid for those who qualify under federal guidelines. 4) Obamacare which handles those in the middle and between jobs, as well as handling issues such as pre-existing conditions. 5) private insurance. 6) VA care for veterans.

What is important to understand is that for the first five sources mentioned above, the government doesn’t really run the system. In other words, doctors and hospitals are kind of private contractors. They are free to provide care to whom they choose, although most do accept these plans.

Only in the last case (the VA system) are doctors and nurses largely, but not exclusively, government employees. The VA hospitals are owned by the government. Tell me, how well that has been working out for the typical VA patient?

If you look into the details of Medicare For All there may not be a single unified proposal across the country, but the basics are pretty much the same in all of them. Annual costs alone have been estimated by many nonpartisan organizations between $2 trillion and $3 trillion. For those who don’t know, a trillion is one thousand billion.

If I had the chance, these are some of the questions I would ask these candidates this coming fall:

Question 1: Where is the money going to come from to pay for this plan? And don’t tell me by taxing the rich. According to IRS statistics if you increased the federal tax rate for the top 5 percent of taxpayers by 20 percent, that would net you $300 billion at best. Where does the rest come from?

Question 2: What would happen to employer-sponsored health plans? Here’s a hint, they would likely be scrapped. If you like your current employer plan, you are out of luck.

Question 3: Will doctors and hospitals be forced to participate in this plan, and will they still be allowed to accept privately insured patients?

Question 4: What will happen to private insurance plans for those who can afford it?

Now some folks can nitpick my arguments and have a different view, or complain that I left things out. Fair enough. Regardless, I really have issues with politicians (left and right) who talk about proposals that deal with extremely complicated and personal issues at a kindergarten level, and hope no one asks for details. Well, I operate at a much higher level than that, and I expect politicians who are vying for my vote to treat me like an educated adult.

In summary, Medicare For All will cost us money we don’t have, and even worse will cost us a good bit of our personal medical care freedom. There are ways to work within the current systems and fix most of our problems. They require hard choices. All we need is to have both parties work together. Good luck with that.

Brian Gillespie
Milton