ABOVE: From Mark Dixon on Flickr (license)
Written by Jeff Epstein, Editor of Citizens’ Media TV.
(Originally privately written for NJ-3 Democratic candidate Andy Kim in May of 2017)
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Broad support
75% of Democrats, 60% of Independents, and 46% of Republicans favor single payer healthcare.
From page 88 of April 2017 Economist poll
Here is an article elaborating on this poll.
Republican support for Medicare for All has significantly increased in the past two years.
From 2015 Kaiser Family Foundation poll.
Single payer healthcare would save hundreds of billions of dollars due to improved administrative efficiencies (because of not having to worry about insurance company profit!):
From page 2 of 2010 U.S. Department of Health and Humans Services study.
Benefits of Medicare for All
- Single payer healthcare uncouples healthcare from employment. It unchains people from having to stay at a job in order to prevent losing coverage.
- “Businesses would save over $9,400 a year in health care costs for the average employee. The average annual cost to the employer for a worker with a family who makes $50,000 a year would go from $12,591 to just $3,100.” The program is significantly paid for by a modest income tax increase:
- 37 percent on income between $250,000 and $500,000 (currently 33%)
- 43 percent on income between $500,000 and $2 million.
- 48 percent on income between $2 million and $10 million. (Affects only 113,000 households)
- 52 percent on income above $10 million. (currently 39.6%. Affects only 13,000 U.S. households)
Costs
According to Bernie Sanders, the cost of Medicare for All for the average American household would be a $500/year tax. Out-of-pocket medical
costs currently average are $5000/year…plus the hassle of red tape. (Note this is framed as “raising your
taxes,” despite being an overall $4,500 savings.)
The Urban Institute and the Tax Policy Center have released an analysis of the costs of Bernie Sanders’ domestic policy proposals, including single-payer national health insurance. They claim that proposals would raise the federal deficit by $18 trillion over the next decade. To put it bluntly, the estimates are ridiculous. They posit outlandish increases in the utilization of medical care, and ignore vast savings under single-payer reform, and ignore the extensive and well documented experience with single-payer systems in other nations — which all spend far less per person on health care than we do.
Medicare for all, not for profit
ObamaCare/ACA is a strongly conservative policy. Many of its main ideas originated from the Heritage Foundation:
The Heritage Foundation calls itself:
[T]he nation’s largest, most broadly-supported conservative research and educational institution—a think tank—The Heritage Foundation has been the bastion of the American conservative movement since our founding in 1973.
Insurance is meant for things unlikely to happen. Non-emergency healthcare is a common, regular occurrence for everyone. Insurance for a common regular thing is nonsensical. Profit off of people’s pain and suffering is immoral. The medical insurance industry is built on profiting off of sickness and injury.
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