PrintAugust 3, 2019
Medicare for all? Show the math
Catherine Rampell is a Washington Post columnist I rarely agree with, but she's obviously a sane Democrat and asks some hard questions about the Democratic presidential candidates' pie-in-the-sky schemes, which they call 'Medicare for All.'
In her August 1 column, she asks:
At the debates, in post-debate spin rooms and on Sunday TV show interviews, the Democratic presidential candidates are asked these questions repeatedly as if they are “gotcha” questions. Then they duck and weave to avoid providing the honest but damning (affirmative) sound bite, instead offering some version of: I can convince voters they’d still come out ahead.But in fact the real third rail of health-care reform — whether we’re talking about single-payer, a public option or anything else — is the question no one seems to be asking: Will you require doctors to make less money?
I agree with her that Democrats should show all their math on Medicare for all, including the answer to that question.
Of course, most likely, a 'Medicare for All' scheme would reduce what everyone in the medical field earns, including doctors. The only people who wouldn't see a cut in income would be the very wealthy bureaucratic elites of the Washington D.C. area. They will get even wealthier, expanding the wealth and income gap.
Millions of private sector jobs will be lost and a huge number of businesses will be destroyed. Particularly hard hit will be rural hospitals. Access to health care will be worse, not better. And this doesn't even take into account the auxillary question which ought to come up as an unintended consequence: How many doctors will retire early and how many won't go through more than ten years of education if the potential rewards are reduced substantially? Will Democrats ever try to get colleges to lower their costs? They will not, because that is one of their major special interests.
Bernie Sanders and others are selling to the public the idea that Medicare pays for everything and no one will ever worry again. That is a load of manure that the media should correct.
My 91 year-old mother went to the hospital in 2017 with a broken back in severe pain. They were shooting her up with morphine and other stuff. The hospital, at the behest of Medicare, did everything they could to keep her from being admitted to the hospital because, heaven forbid, if she were in the hospital for three days, they would be liable for her first twenty days in a nursing home facility. Medicare pays bonuses to hospitals and nursing homes if they behave and do not readmit patients, that is the incentive they currently have.
I have been responsible fur buying health care for my employer and over two hundred employees for over twenty years. I would rather argue with Blue Cross or another private health insurance company than all the crap I go through when I have to deal with Medicare.
The government runs the VA and Indian health service poorly, too. We know there's no good customer service in government health care. So why would these same people be good at running health care for 100% of us?
I feel tremendously sorry for the poor, the mentally disabled, and the elderly who don't have advocates fighting for them like my brother (an attorney) and I did for my mother.
I hope journalists do their job on Medicare for All, the green new deal, free college, and all the other programs Democrats are offering in order to buy our votes. They are lying to get more government power. It is truly a shame that Democrats seem to think profits and corporations are dirty words.
Also, If Democrats truly wanted reparations for blacks they would have fought for it throughout the Obama/Biden terms. They did not. They are just pretending to keep blacks on the reservation and dependent on government.
The whole thing goes to show just how weak and ineffectual the press are at doing their jobs. Rampell gets credit for asking one of the hard questions. Where are the rest of them?
Image credit: Molly Adams, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0
