If California couldn’t figure out how to pay for it, heck, if little Vermont couldn’t figure out how to pay for it, how will Los Federales pay for it?
(Reason)  Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) plans to unveil his long-awaited “Medicare for all” proposal for government-controlled, single-payer health care. His colleague, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), is all-in on the scheme. “Medicare for All is one way that we can give every single person in the country access to high quality health care,” she writes. “Everyone is covered. Nobody goes broke paying a medical bill. Families don’t have to bear the costs of heartbreaking medical disasters on their own.”
And for starting us along the path to all of that high-quality care, she adds, “We owe a huge debt to President Obama.”
Well, there is something there. Debt, that is. Huge, accumulating mounds of it, swamping everything in sight. In 2001, the Congressional Budget Office warned that spending on retirees—specifically Social Security and Medicare—”will consume…almost as much of the economic output in 2030 as does the entire federal government today.”
“Notwithstanding recent favorable developments,” the Medicare Trustees conceded in their report this year, “current-law projections indicate that Medicare still faces a substantial financial shortfall that will need to be addressed with further legislation.” The report foresees that “the trust fund becomes depleted in 2029.”
Realistically, we’re looking at a minimum of $48 trillion ($48,000,000,000,000) in unfunded liabilities for Medicare. Lots of Democrats, especially the newer ones like Kamala Harris (Brokifornia), are super enthused by this. Oh, and fewer and fewer doctors and health practices are accepting patients on Medicare. Will the Medicare for all scheme force doctors/health facilities to accept it?
A big part of the problem, as Cato’s Tanner pointed out earlier this year is that “Americans want widely contradictory things from health-care reform. They want the highest-quality care for everyone, with no wait, from the doctor of their choice. And they want it as cheap as possible, preferably for free.”
Promising, as Sanders and Warren do, to give everybody high-quality health care without regard for ability to pay will always find an enthusiastic audience. But delivering on that promise is likely to give us not the illusion of Medicare for All, but rather its awful, unsustainable reality.
And, how does Government pay for it? It should be amusing to see their math. If they even bother. California didn’t even bother attempting to figure out a way. They just spiked it.
Its just another way for the communist left to bankrupt America. Even Obamacare was a plan put in place to bankrupt dozens of insurance agencies as well has hospitals, clinics and medical device companies around the nation.
The only way that the communists win is if the government gets to be in charge of everything that the citizens need. Believe me when I tell you that Americans will go into full scale revolution when this happens. In Europe We came out of World War two so destitute that anything was better then the bombed out cities we had. It was easy to force a version of communism on to most of the citizens.
Force them to have nothing then offer them something. Bait and switch philosophy. This is what Obamacare was always intended to do. Even Obama said himself “Good luck repealing the ACA.” once it was in force. The GOP is now running away from it rather then finding solutions they are hiding behind trees just as Obama predicted would happen.
It will be paid for the way that all government programs get paid for: through taxes.
The numbers are a bit fuzzy, but the simplest way is to raise the Medicare tax rate from 2.90% to around 20%. Sound huge? Well, it is, but if you then lose having to pay for private health insurance, the higher taxes are mitigated.
Business would love this! Assuming that half of the 20% would be paid by the employer, as it is right now, you are looking at a roughly $120,000 per year employee before the Medicare tax becomes higher than what businesses are already paying for health insurance coverage. It’s only the businesses which don’t provide health insurance which are going to get stuck.
The beauty of this is that everyone will have to pay something.
Personally, I would prefer that the government not guarantee access to health care, and if you don’t pay for it, you don’t get it, even if that means that you die earlier due to the lack. But, unfortunately, we have accepted the principle that the government will guarantee health care; when the Republicans campaigned on ‘repeal and replace,’ the replace part conceded the principle.
Health care quality will suffer under Medicare for all, but the left won’t admit that.
Most OECD nations have universal healthcare systems insuring access to high quality healthcare for all residents, and every nation does it for less per capita than the US.
Residents of communist “hellholes” such as Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Israel, Japan etc strongly support their healthcare systems.
YES! We do Mr. Jeffery. Look also at the countries you just mentioned. They have no militaries to speak of. They all. Everyone of them depend upon the United States of America to ensure that they will not be over run by aggressive countries around them. Russia. China. Name your muslim state in the mid east.
Nothing is ever free. Healthcare for all has a huge price. That price is a country that cannot afford anything more than a small national guard with the exception of Israel which actually keeps a rather modest military in place although if you know anything at all about the Israeli Military it is mostly the equivalent of the National guard the USA has in place.
Another argument designed to put at risk a 100 nations around the world that quite literally depend upon the USA for their security. Just the fact that the USA would come to the aid of nearly every country on its allies list keep these countries safe from full scale attacks.
That in turn means they can afford to spend 25 percent of their GDP on healthcare rather then keeping up a military that does the same thing America does for free.
That is incorrect. Maybe they can afford to spend that much, but they don’t. These nations all spend LESS of their GDP on health care than does the US. Advanced nations spend about 8-12% of GDP on health care, the US spends about 17% of GDP, and the US still doesn’t cover all its citizens.
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SHA
The US spends 3.3% of GDP on the military. Other advanced nations spend 1% (Japan) to 5.8% (Israel). Most advanced nations cluster in the 2-3% range.
Im not sure where you get your figures.
The Netherlands is among the top spenders on health across the world and, since 2008, health expenditure has risen more steeply than in almost any other high-income country.
Additionally I will add that in the Netherlands the government spend around 10 percent of its GDP on subsidies while the individuals must buy insurance from non profit insurance companies. Hence the real cost of health care in this country is around 25 percent of the GDP. Because if you are spending money to purchase health care insurance you are not spending money on other things.
As a result in the Netherlands alone we have struggled with a yearly growth rate that has struggled along at between .6 percent and 1.6 percent over the last decade. Stagnant growth has forced cut backs in not only the military but other programs including end of life care which accounts for 25 percent of all spending.
The left in America would have you believe that everything is just peachy keen everywhere but in the United States where your argument is based upon a totally false understanding of economics. While the cost of health care is certainly higher then in the EU, what you do not account for is that health care is private, contributing to your GDP as well as contributing millions of jobs. A private system could never be funded by the USA. The costs would just be too staggering.
Rotterdam complained:
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SHA
We linked to
, which lists the Netherlands as spending 10.5% of GDP on health care in 2016, not 25%. These data include ALL spending on healthcare, including gov’t subsidies, private premiums, drug expenditures etc. ALL.
Our argument is only that other advanced nations spend much less per capita and as a fraction of GDP than does the US, delivering high quality healthcare to all their residents for less. These facts tend to refute the argument that single payer healthcare costs more than the US system.
You mean Japan, where people of means — and connections — buy private insurance plans, so they don’t get stuck with the low-quality health care given to the masses? Or Canada, where they’ve just now gotten waiting times down to under a season? Or the UK, where the National Health Service has told hospitals to delay appointments for eight weeks, to save money?
We are going to be stuck with single-payer coverage, no doubt about that. But it will be poor coverage, where bureaucrats decide everything, and systemic delays will be used to cut costs, just like our own VA system did, because costs have to be cut.
Medicare for all except the wealthy, politicians or the other well connected.
Mr. TEACH typed:
This year? Over a decade? A century? LOL
As a nation do you think we would spend more on Medicare than we spend overall on healthcare?
Do you understand how Medicare works? Or how any insurance works?
Various flavors of communism murdered maybe 200 million last century, made paupers of the Cubans (a formerly rich nation), Venezuela (ditto), norks, all of E Europe, and you feel like we should give their philosophy another chance? You my friend, are a retard.
Is your point that single payer healthcare will murder millions of Americans? Or do you have a point?
We’re not your friends, in fact, we’re embarrassed by your moniker.
Can you explain from where Mr. tEAch pulled his $48 trillion number?
Bless your little heart.
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Unfunded liabilities means just that. The USA is on the hook for closer to 100 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
JAN 17, 2014 @ 07:00 AM 89,143
You Think The Deficit Is Bad? Federal Unfunded Liabilities Exceed $127 Trillion
From your Forbes Magazine. One only has to google the information to find the various unfunded liabilities that exist around the country.
These do not even account for all of the magnanimous pension plans that are literally bankrupt using Ponzi schemes to continue paying their retirees. Or simply put they use the proceeds from this years payees to payout payments to those already retired. This means that eventually they will go broke because unless you can exceed outlays by revenue the system is designed to collapse.
Medicare is in this quandry although it would be easily solvable with a 1.5 percent increase in payroll taxes to the employee which is then matched by the employer.
Why do they simply not raise these taxes? Because the left would go insane over an increase in medicare, social security taxes for one very simple reason. While the poor do not pay income taxes they do in fact pay medicare and SSi payroll taxes. That is automatic. You cant opt out. You cant get a refund for them. So those hit the hardeest with medicare for all would indeed be the poor. Now if you go the route of well we cant make the poor pay, then that means the close to 1 trillion collected from the poor each year would then have to be made up by the middle class.
The middle class is that group of individuals that the communist left pretends to want to help. But as with Stalin, Lenin and Mao the first thing they did was eliminate the middle class from their countries. So as we can see everything the left does is designed to destroy the middle class, not help it.
While in the same breath pretending they are all about the middle class in your country. One only has to look at the 8 years of Obama to see that the rich made out like bandits while the middle class continued to shink under a president and of course at one time under a democratic controlled government who did not lift a finger to help the middle class. In fact Obama passed 1000’s of regulations that hurt the middle class all the while the left continues to say it is the right who despise the poor and the middle class while depending on at that 1 percent of rich people to keep electing them.
Spurious arguments sold to the American people by a press that is also highly infiltrated by communists. See Van Jones, Lawrence O’Donnell of Cnn and MSNBC who have publicly proclaimed their allegiances to said social system. There are of course many others that I dont feel like googling to find their personal quotes. Even your ABC owned and operated ESPN is now full of political hacks rather then sports announcers.
Your country is on the brink people. It is why Trump winning the election on nationalist pride was such a blow to the left.
Forgive my rambling but the world so depends upon a stable USA and everyone on both sides of the Isle is bound and determined to head down the path of anarchy in your country that the election of Trump did upset foreign governments but not in the way you might imagine.
So Bank Fraud Bernie and Pocacuntus are unveiling their, um, “plans”…
What could go wrong?
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I love how you automatically turn to attacks on peoples integrity when they disagree with your position. That as an aside note:
No they dont. That is the point. In everyone of those countries the government spends X percent of their GDP, usually between 8-13 percent depending on the country in subsidies. The rest of the healthcare provided is by individual insurance that costs the individuals money from their salaries.
When you take this into account which the left never does, the GDP spending goes much closer to the 25 percent mark. You have to look at the whole picture which Im sure would then invalidate the leftist argument.
In each country especially in the EU private insurance is purchased as the government only pays a portion of the healthcare costs. This private insurance is money taken from the economy which expands the actual cost of healthcare in every country.
You keep saying that but it is simply untrue. Period. The figures from the OECD (and the CIA Factbook and the WHO etc) are for TOTAL expenditures on healthcare – public and private. TOTAL.
By all means show the evidence that 10.6% is really 25%. WE’RE not sure where you get YOUR figures.
Obviously you know more about my health insurance plan then I do.
In the Netherlands the employer pays 9.35 percent tax for health insurance.
In addition another 7.65 percent tax is split by employee and employer.
Those two add up to 17 percent.
The the government offers subsidies to the very poor as well as those who meet an income threshold. Yet for the the Netherlands the tax rate for businesses is: 25 percent not the 35 percent in the USA. Why was it lowered in the last dozen years from a top rate of 33.5 to the current 25 percent? Well you guessed it, the difference is made up elsewhere plus the demand that employers provide health care was growing burdensome.
In addition did you know that in the Netherlands the poor total taxation is 36.55 percent and 40.15 percent depending upon how poor you actually are. That is because they are tasked with paying what is called a General Social Security levy on top of only an 8.40 percent income tax rate.
Curiously the rich are not asked to pay the GSSL but are then taxed at 52 percent. Is all that in your CIA handbook?
Well done, Rot.
Again, you are comparing apples and elephants.
The FACT is that the TOTAL expenditure for healthcare in the Netherlands is 10.6% of GDP, not 25%. You claimed that other nations were able to spend more (25% of GDP) on healthcare than the US since other nations didn’t have to spend as much on defense. The FACT is that all these nations with universal healthcare spend less of their GDP on healthcare than does the US. It’s a simple, direct and undisputed FACT.
Does this fact prove that universal healthcare systems are superior to the US for-profit system? Of course not, but it does prove that every other advanced nation delivers health care for less than the US.
But we understand why you would want to change the subject.
So little jeffvckery gets his ass handed to him and so he performs his little linguistic tap dance because the math is too confusing.
Well done, little dumbass, well done.