"If you made it law, it would cost as much as the whole country is worth. I would have to sell my automobile, my house, my property, everything, and contribute it to that, and you know that's not going to happen."
That above quote is not from Hillary Clinton, though you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was after her unjustified comments against universal single-payer healthcare during Saturday’s debate. It is instead from a candidate she once worked for, Mr. Conservative himself...Barry Goldwater.
While not quite as direct as Goldwater, here is what she had to say when explaining her opposition to a single-payer healthcare system last weekend:
”Free college, a single-payer system for health, and it's been estimated were looking at 18 to $20 trillion, about 40 percent in the federal budget.
And I have looked at his proposed plans for healthcare for example, and it really does transfer every bit of our healthcare system including private healthcare, to the states to have the states run. And I think we've got to be really thoughtful about how we're going to afford what we proposed, which is why everything that I have proposed I will tell you exactly how I'm going to pay for it.”
To be blunt, Secretary Clinton is wrong. Very wrong. What’s worse is she’s trotting out talking points against providing healthcare to all of our citizens as a right straight out of the conservative playbook. Her arguments are right out of the pages of Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, where they were immediately debunked upon printing. Let’s take a minute and actually look at the costs related to a single-payer healthcare plan and the impact it would have on average Americans.
MILLIONS ARE STILL WITHOUT COVERAGE
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is without a doubt one of the broadest attempts to reform healthcare in this country’s history. With powerful special interests including pharmaceutical companies and the insurance industry working to stop reform at every turn, fixing our broken healthcare system has never been easy. While in many respects rather modest, the ACA accomplished many great things and was a solid step in the right direction. Allowing children to stay on their parents insurance until the age of 26, doing away with insurance companies’ ability to deny customers based on pre-existing conditions, expanding Medicaid, and causing our country’s uninsured rate to fall to one of the lowest levels we have ever seen are just a few of the ACA’s accomplishments.
Before the Affordable Care Act was implemented, the healthcare system was paid for largely by the model of cross-subsidization. This is when an uninsured individual uses a hospital, and the hospital must get compensated for that care. If the uninsured cannot pay for the treatment, which is often, the hospital has to seek funds elsewhere. This is where you, the insured, comes in. The hospital finds reimbursement for caring for the uninsured by charging insurance companies a higher fee to hold them in their insurance network. The insurance companies turn around and then put a hidden fee in you, the insured’s, premium.
Despite these advances, an estimated 33 million Americans are still without health coverage and millions more are paying exorbitant premiums and not getting the full coverage they need. An obvious solution to address these remaining challenges would be to move towards a universal “Medicare for All” system, but many critics claim the cost is just too immense for our economy me to handle. That’s a patently false statement and let me explain why.
BUT WHAT WILL IT COST?
When Bernie Sanders began to advocate for this sort of plan earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal pounced and, sounding a lot like Hillary Clinton at the debate, declared the plan too expensive and unfeasible. By their analysis, a “Medicare for All” system would come with a price tag of $15 trillion over ten years. Ignoring everything else, they are not wrong. The system would indeed cost about that much over the course of a decade, but it ignores the broader financial impact moving away from our private insurance system would have.
First, let’s make note that our current system costs infinitely more. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, America will spend a total of $42 trillion on healthcare over the course of the next decade. That is nearly triple the cost of a “Medicare for All” system. Per capita, Americans are currently spending about $10,000 a year on health care, with single payer universal healthcare, individual healthcare costs would plummet well below that figure. We know this, not just by using simple mathematics, but because other countries have implemented similar ideas and they are paying on average just a quarter per capita. There is LITERALLY not a single country in the world that has implemented a single-payer system that pays more per capita on healthcare than we do in the United States. Not a single one.
When skeptics speak of the “astronomical” cost that would accompany a plan like the one Bernie Sanders has put forth, remind them it is nearly impossible for any new plan to cost more than what we are currently spending. That is out absurd our health care costs have become under the private insurance model. Also remind them, that the estimated $15 trillion over ten years is not NEW spending on top of current costs, it is in lieu of them. There is no “new” expense here. You may hear some claim that taxes will increase and this is likely to be true, but it ignores a fundamental point. When you do away with private insurance, you do away with the costs related to private insurance. Even if costs were equal (which as we already discussed, they are not), it just changes the way you incur the expense. No longer would you be spending “X” amount of dollars a year to private insurance, you’d be paying it in taxes to fund the single-payer model. It is not adding costs, it is changing the recipient of the money from private companies to the government. But, as laid out already, that change comes with a substantial savings to the individual, so individual costs would drop to a fraction of what they currently are.
NO DEMOCRAT SHOULD OPPOSE THIS
Some things seem too good to be true, but this is not one of those things. We know, backed by lots of analysis and factual evidence, that implementing a single-payer system would save us money as a nation, allow us to provide health coverage to every last one of our citizens, and bring down their individual costs. To reject or try to slander this plan is not just fiscally irresponsible, though it certainly is that, it is also morally reprehensible. When over 30 million Americans are still in need of care and countless others are unable to afford skyrocketing premiums — we must act to rectify that problem. If you oppose single-payer on flimsy data and scare tactics, I personally believe, you probably shouldn’t be vying to lead the Democratic Party as this opposition it goes against everything we are supposed to stand for.
So to any Democrat, no matter the office you are running for, please do your due diligence and properly research this issue. We need to unify as a party behind a single-payer “Medicare for All” to end the international embarrassment of being the only major developed nation to deny healthcare to all our citizens as a right.
Erik Altieri is the President of the Agenda Project and the Agenda Project Action Fund
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