Question about Medicare 4 all, how would it cost more than the current system?

[ehrnst]

69. "Medicare for All" is actually misleading, but great marketing.

Sort of like "right to work" states.

But the moniker “Medicare for All” is misleading. Sanders’s proposal actually scraps Medicare’s operating model, which mimics the private sector’s insurance-company-based structure, including the use of private insurers for administrative tasks. BernieCare, by contrast, would eliminate the private sector’s role in insurance provision. In fact, Sanders seeks to discard the current patchwork of government and private options: Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor, employer-provided insurance for the better-off and ACA policies for those who fall through the cracks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/09/26/medicare-for-all-sounds-great-but-berniecare-is-a-political-flop/

There is nothing about single-payer that inherently does a single thing about far and away the biggest profiteers in the health-care system, which are not insurers but providers, as Phillip Longman has pointed out:

Adopting a single-payer system might have done a lot of good — twenty years ago. But since then, a massive wave of corporate consolidations has transformed the American health care delivery system in ways that make the single-payer approach highly problematic. Most Americans now live in places where there is little or no competition among medical providers. In market after market, hospitals, clinics, physician practices, labs, and other key health care infrastructure have been merged into monopolies controlling nearly all aspects of health care in the areas in which they operate.

Thus, without additional reforms, single-payer could wind up enabling a massive set of corporate subsidies in the name of, well, democratic socialism.

In any event, those who wish to use “Medicare for All” as a descriptor for anything other than a simple expansion of the current program to make it universal have no particular standing to lecture others that they are misappropriating the term. In the long run whatever progressives lose from not fully exploiting the popularity of Medicare they might well gain from better public understanding of what they are actually proposing, with all its costs as well as benefits.

The decision not to include a funding scheme was a calculated one, and as Sanders himself told the Washington Post, “there has not been the kind of research and study that we need” to put together cost estimates and funding plans in the proposed bill.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/medicare-for-all-wont-bring-medicare-to-all.html