Tag Archives: Medicare for all

Fix Budget Problems With Medicare-For-All

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(Post title changed…)

Nate Silver has a much-discussed post today in the NY Times, What Is Driving Growth in Government Spending?. Silver goes over the numbers and writes,

To clarify: all of the major categories of government spending have been increasing relative to inflation. But essentially all of the increase in spending relative to economic growth, and the potential tax base, has come from entitlement programs, and about half of that has come from health care entitlements specifically.

The growth in health care expenditures, for better or worse, is not just a government problem: private spending on health care is increasing at broadly the same rates and is eating up a larger and larger share of economic activity. It’s an immensely complicated problem, but the arithmetic is simple: if we can’t slow the rate of growth in health care expenditures, we’ll either have to raise taxes, cut other government spending or continue to run huge deficits. Or we could hope to grow our way out of the problem, but health care expenditures may be impeding private-sector growth as well.

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This Health Reform Bill Is Political Suicide

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I posted this earlier at Open Left
Back in July I wrote here, in Democrats Had Better Find Hiding Places

I said it the other day, and I feel the need to repeat it: the public does not yet understand that the government is about to order people to buy health insurance, with their own money. Yes, the government is about to order people to cough up hundreds of dollars a month each.
When the Republicans start using their toxic message-machine magic on this, and the public starts to understand that they are being ordered by the government to cough up a huge amount of money every month, Democrats had better have good hiding places, because things are going to get really bad out there.
This is the kind of policy that results when “centrist” Democrats give in to to the demands of Republicans and big corporations and the top 1% of the wealthy. Instead of just taxing the wealthy and corporations at reasonable rates and using the money to provide We, the People with health care — thereby vastly improving the economy for … the wealthy and big corporations — they instead come up with a scheme to order regular people to pay for health insurance because they don’t already have it because they can’t afford it.

Now it is December and the current health care reform bill orders everyone to buy very expensive insurance from the big corporations, with no public option and no Medicare buy-in. Even if you are in the income range where you receive subsidies you have to pay “only” 9 or 10% of your income, at a time when people are runnng up credit cards just to get by as it is. That is with the subsidies. Above that level you pay more.
The public hasn’t really tuned into this yet, but if this passes and Republicans start working their toxic magic (with of course little or no organized effort by Dems to counter their lies and sell it to the public) I expect this will be as unppular as Bush’s bailout of the big financial firms, which the Republicans have largely engineered the public into thinking was Obama’s, just as they did with the Bush deficits.
So I think that when all these factors come into play for the next election, passing this will turn out to be suicide for the Democrats who hold office. They don’t see that because at this point are in a mindset that the public wants them to just get it over with and pass anything.
But this is bad beyond just the next election.

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Single-Payer vs Medicare For All

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I’m hearing proposals for “Single-payer healthcare” again.
Please, please, please don’t call it “Single-payer healthcare.” Please call it “Medicare for all“.
Everyone knows and likes and understands Medicare. It has been around for a while. It has the word “care” in it. Everyone knows it works and helps people.
NO ONE understands what “single-payer” means. It is a complicated word-construct. It contains the word “payer” which works against acceptance. It requires you to start from scratch to sell the idea, and from a marketing background I can tell you that all the money in the world isn’t going to sell “single-payer healthcare” to the public.
If you call it Medicare for all, people immediately understand, accept and like the idea.
Please, please banish “single-payer healthcare” from your vocabulary. Please.