Choices for Financing Medicare for All: A Preliminary Analysis.
Committee for a responsible federal budget:
Proposals to adopt single-payer health care in the United States have grown in popularity in recent years, as numerous lawmakers and presidential candidates have embraced Medicare for All. However, few have grappled with how to finance the new costs imposed on the federal government. By most estimates, Medicare for All would cost the federal government about $30 trillion over the next decade. How this cost is financed would have considerable distributional, economic, and policy implications.
In the coming months, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget will publish a detailed analysis describing numerous ways to finance Medicare for All and the consequences and trade-offs associated with each choice. This paper provides our preliminary estimates of the magnitude of each potential change and a brief discussion of the types of trade-offs policymakers will need to consider.
We find that Medicare for All could be financed with:
- A 32 percent payroll tax
- A 25 percent income surtax
- A 42 percent value-added tax (VAT)
- A mandatory public premium averaging $7,500 per capita – the equivalent of $12,000 per individual not otherwise on public insurance
- More than doubling all individual and corporate income tax rates
- An 80 percent reduction in non-health federal spending
- A 108 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increase in the national debt
- Impossibly high taxes on high earners, corporations, and the financial sector
- A combination of approaches
Each of these choices would have consequences for the distribution of income, growth in the economy, and ability to raise new revenue. Some of these consequences could be balanced against each other by adopting a combination approach that includes smaller versions of several of the options as well as additional policies.
Consequences could also be mitigated through aggressive efforts to lower per-person health care costs and/or by substantially scaling back the generosity or comprehensiveness of Medicare for All.
The Cost of Medicare for All
Though it is a somewhat amorphous term, the term Medicare for All has come to represent proposals that offer universal, single-payer health insurance coverage for virtually all health care services (including dental, vision, and long-term care) with no meaningful premiums, deductibles, copayments, or restrictive networks. read more
Aaaaaaaannnnnnnd all it’s really going to do is make Medicare Suck for everybody who actually EARNED it!!!
Go to Hell Liawatha!
I just had a Facebook friend say that she trusted the CA government to do a better job with electricity than PG&E. Because they are so good with everything else! But business = greed, and obviously government people care about us and are only there to help.
The whole piece is a pile of horse dung, so is she. Single payer is about as popular as the bubonic plague was in medieval Europe!
This Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is lead by Adumb Shiff for brains!
Don’t worry the “health insurance” industry is quickly lining up to offer “Medicare supplemental” insurance packages. I get 4-5 flyers every week and am inundated with constant commercials. The insurance industry just changed routes a bit, but they will survive to pilfer, plunder and loot all the money they can…..filthy leeches that they are….
No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline. – Calvin Coolidge
I believe this is true and applies to ‘healthcare’.
The best thing DC can do for the people’s healthcare is Get Out of it.
I don’t think much of any of those “options” to finance this scheme. Trump 2020!
I’m gonna go all willystradamus on this…..Medicare will be the basis point, and that will go up 10 to 20 fold. The supplemental portion will be your ‘choice’ and that will be priced on how close you can keep your butt cheeks closed…..You will have toddlers, teenagers, all other folks enrolled into some sort of what used to be named ‘Medicare’. They will change the name. This will happen sometime when President Trump takes office in 2020….The Insurance industry knows that we are headed to single payer health care and they have to get some, so it will happen as some sort of supplement that you can theoretically ‘choose’ your coverage….the costs will be just like Obamacare or worse and that’s because THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY wants to tell you to get a prostate exam and wear a seat belt and send their management group to Tahiti for ‘meetings’….I’m gonna bookmark this so I can tell you I told you so….Otherwise ask the local commentator insurance guru about his burgeoning Medicare supplemental business….that’s it. I’ve blown a gasket and need to go watch the Astros take the world series….