Single-Payer: The Devil Is In The Details!
Proponents for Medicare for All want to sweep away our complex, confusing, profit-driven mess of a health care system and fresh with a single government-run insurer that would cover everyone.
Doing away with an entire industry would be profoundly disruptive. The private health insurance business employs at least a half a million, covers about 250 million Americans and generates roughly a trillion dollars in revenues. Its companies’ stocks are a staple of the mutual funds that make up millions of Americans’ retirement savings.
No one has examined the full economic impact of such plans on:
Jobs: Legislators writing the bills acknowledge that people in the health insurance industry would lose their jobs. Proposals in the House and Senate would set aside funds to help cushion the blow to displaced workers, offering them training, benefits and income supports.
Investors: Simply, talk of Medicare for All makes investors jittery. Shares of the large publicly held insurance companies including Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealth, fell when Representative Pramila Jayapal, Dem of Washington, introduced her bill but later rebounded. There will be no compensation provided to investors in the bill.
Stock Market: The health insurance companies’ stock make-up millions of Americans’ retirement savings. Stocks will tank!
Doctors: Doctors will all be paid by the same payment rules and have less bureaucracy to deal with.
Illegal/Undocumented Citizens: Medicare for All will be extended to everyone in the U.S. whether you are a legal U.S. citizen or not.
Hospitals: Hospitals will all be paid by the same government rules. Hospital revenues are liable to decrease and patient care will likely increase since Medicare for All will include illegal citizens.
Insurance Companies: The effective takeover of the health insurance industry in the U.S. would mean a huge hit in the companies’ stocks. The insurance industry and many other health care industries vociferously oppose these plans and intend to spend heavily in fighting them.
Pharmaceutical Manufacturers: Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF), a group comprised of major drugmakers, insurance companies, and private hospitals has been lobbying members of Congress, running on-line Ads and working with the media to drive down the popularity of Medicare for All, a single-payer health platform.
Labor Unions: Many union leaders believe that a government-controlled healthcare system will lead to higher taxes and lower quality healthcare. Unions have fought too hard and too long to give up their higher wages and expanded health benefits to give up what they have for political promises that are vague at best.
The proposals of a single-payer plan are wide-ranging and the cost is unclear. We know it will be trillions of dollars and that everyone’s taxes will increase at some level. Once a single-payer plan is implemented, there will be no going back. It is a slippery slope to socialized medicine and socialism has never bode well for the working class.
If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. It is important to get the facts and learn exactly what is at stake. The devil is in the details.
Source: opensecrets.org