How single payer helps Republicans change the subject

[ehrnst]

27. I know exactly why Sanders chose it. Medicare is popular. That's good marketing. Good politics.

Sanders named it that. His co-sponsors are going to call it by name, because if they don't, they don't get the press that comes with agreeing with Bernie. And many people will be led to believe that not only is it just an "expansion" of medicare, it would cost the same, which is not the case at all.

Sanders knows what will sell, especially to a public that doesn't know just how complicated health care policy can be. He's been a politician for a long, long time.

At the same time, Medicare-for-All is really smart politics. Medicare is not only popular, it’s also familiar. Many of us have parents or grandparents who are enrolled in the program. And polls show that a significant majority of Americans now believe that it’s the government’s “responsibility to provide health coverage for all.”

But from a policy standpoint, Medicare-for-All is probably the hardest way to get there. In fact, a number of experts who tout the benefits of single-payer systems say that the Medicare-for-All proposals currently on the table may be virtually impossible to enact. The timing alone would cause serious shocks to the system. Conyers’s House bill would move almost everyone in the country into Medicare within a single year. We don’t know exactly what Bernie Sanders will propose in the Senate, but his 2013 “American Health Security Act” had a two-year transition period. Radically restructuring a sixth of the economy in such short order would be like trying to stop a cruise ship on a dime.

Harold Pollack, a University of Chicago public-health researcher and liberal advocate for universal coverage, says, “There has not yet been a detailed single-payer bill that’s laid out the transitional issues about how to get from here to there. We’ve never actually seen that. Even if you believe everything people say about the cost savings that would result, there are still so many detailed questions about how we should finance this, how we can deal with the shock to the system, and so on.”

However, when you lead people to believe that something will deliver what it will not, it can give opponents ammunition that "you lied."

“Remember how much trouble President Obama got into when he said that if you like your insurance you can keep it?” asks Pollack. “For something like 1.6 million people, that promise turned out to be hard to keep. And that created a firestorm.” Those 1.6 million people represented less than 1 percent of the non-elderly population, and most of them lost substandard McPlans which left them vulnerable if they got sick. The ACA extended coverage to almost 10 times as many people, but those who lost their policies nonetheless became the centerpiece of the right’s assault on the law. Trump and other Republicans are still talking about these “victims” of Obamacare to this day.

https://www.thenation.com/article/medicare-for-all-isnt-the-solution-for-universal-health-care/