And believe it or not, despite all the other industrialized countries having some kind of all payer systems, not one has resulted in a socialist collapse or communist takeover. That's right, NOT ONE, which should finally put to rest that ridiculous Republican talking point.
I have finally found a video clip that conservatives might watch, because it was on Fox Business. I know, there's still that attention span thing, but we can hope.
Medicare-for-All Explained, Finally: Guest Dr. Adam Gaffney took on every question the three Fox hosts could throw at him, even the dumb mindless illogical ones. Maybe this will finally convince conservative voters there's a better and less costly way for give everyone health care, and most importantly, save lives:
As I've mentioned before, an all-payer national insurance system would be a dream come true for every Republican, since you can keep your doctor, any doctor, and go to any hospital of your choosing, no networks. Isn't that real freedom?
Check out the answers below for even more Medicare-for-All questions, including how to pay for Medicare-for-All, the myth of "if you like your insurance plan you can keep it," a "global" payment system, the myth of having skin in the game with cost sharing, and keeping the employer side of insurance coverage payments to help pay for the national plan, in the likely event employers don't pass their savings on to their employees in the form of higher wages:
Voxcom: According to Matt Bruenig, who founded the People’s Policy Project:
1. The nature of a competitive insurance system is one of disruption where if you like your plan, you don’t get to keep it. The worst critique, the one that irritates me the most, is the argument about people losing their health care…people lose their health care all the time. They lose their health care every time they switch jobs … when their spouse dies, when they lose their job. Even if you stay in the same job, your employer might switch your health care at the end of the year. In fact, they’re supposed to be shopping around … You don’t get to decide. Your employer decides in many ways, whether to fire you or change the plan … it is objectively a bad argument to say, because people don’t like losing health care, we should maintain a system in which people lose their health care all the time.
2. Global budgeting, paying hospitals and other medical institutions a lump sum in advance instead of paying for every individual service. Canada has global budgeting, Maryland’s all-payer rate setting has global budgeting. Global budgeting may make providers less likely to overutilize health care because there’s less incentive than you would have in a fee-for-service system to just charge and charge and charge and perform unnecessary care.
3. Any tax you use is going to make low earners pay more than they currently pay because they don’t pay anything. My idea is to completely overhaul the whole payroll tax system … The first dollar of earnings is hit with the full unemployment tax, the full Social Security tax, the full Medicare tax. So let’s squeeze all of those into flat taxes. Instead of charging 6 percent on the first $7,000 of earnings, you can knock that down to less than 1 percent on all earnings. You can do that with Social Security as well. Knock that down and apply it to all earnings. Medicare would be unchanged.
That then opens up a higher Medicare tax without there being a net tax increase. Because their unemployment and Social Security tax has gone down substantially you can do a flat Medicare tax and the net effect is it’s all falling on people making more than $100,000 a year. It’s the lower-income people who don’t pay premiums — how do you protect them from a tax rise? I think fixing the payroll taxes does that.
4. The idea is if employers no longer have to provide insurance then they’ll pass through the savings to the workers or maybe they won’t, right? To moot the question, we’re going to require employers to pay contributions into Medicare-for-all that are at least on average equivalent to what they were paying now in private health insurance premiums. It’s applied on the employer side before the money is paid out to the workers. The incidence of employer-side payroll tax is supposed to be basically the same thing as the incidence of private insurance premiums.
5. You’re going to have unnecessary deaths if you have cost-sharing. You’re going to have unnecessary spending if you don’t. I don’t know how you balance that. It seems to me the best approach would be to rely very little on cost-sharing … In general, I don’t think people like going to the doctor. If you make it free, people are going to overutilize it. It’s not like chocolate cake or something.
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