“Medicaid for All” is more appropriate than the too-often-heard “Medicare for All.” Single-payer advocates who espouse “Medicare for All” either don’t understand how Medicare works or seek to mislead and confuse the public about improving American health care. Medicare is not a single-payer system. It is a complicated schedule of approved insurance coverages, replete with restrictions, exemptions, co-pays and deductibles. These gaps in health care coverage, as Medicare itself explains, must be paid out-of-pocket and with supplemental premium-paid insurance policies.
Medicaid for All could become single-payer, but it must never be funded through any trust fund scheme. Instead, it must be part of the annual budget allocation/approval process. This annual funding would enable Congress to get an accurate, “real time” true cost of health care. Even better, Medicaid for All could supersede the Medicare Hospital Insurance and Supplemental Medical Insurance trust funds, effecting an immediate reduction of the National Debt by about $270 billion.
But there’s an invidious reason for the “Medicare for All” canard. Medicare is often called an “earned entitlement” to contrast it with simply “being on welfare.” For about 30 years, “entitlement” has been used to denigrate “undeserving” people getting a handout from government. This is meant to contrast them with the virtuous people who have earned their welfare, citing the fiction that “I paid into it all my life.”
Republicans impugn single-payer as socialized medicine that violates their dictum that the best government is one that governs least. Thus, they don’t understand why “Governments are instituted among Men” or the meaning of the “pursuit of happiness.”
Enacting “Medicaid for All” single-payer health care would bring America into harmony with the precepts of our own Declaration of Independence.
Paul M. Craig
Northampton