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The Economic Trap of ‘Medicare For All’
January 19, 2019, San Francisco, CA – Participant in the Women’s March holds “Medicare for all” sign while marching on Market street. (Shutterstock.com)
A self-described democratic-socialist like Sanders finds these pesky details of business management and incentives irritating irrelevancies that can eventually be solved by clever government officials. After all, if you don’t believe that markets solve problems, why would you think that the market can untie the nation’s health care gridlock? Warren, who has described herself as “capitalist to my bones,” should know better than to trust the federal government to bring order to the national health care system. But the truth is, she deeply disdains markets. Just consider her outlandish proposal to make corporations stack corporate boards with outside stakeholders ultimately accountable to her.
Sadly, the Medicare for All program will collapse under its own weight. First, the bill contains no price constraints whatsoever on universal access to a rich set of benefits, which will be available not only to all American citizens, but also to all resident legal aliens. No one will have to make any monthly contributions to enroll in the program: There are no monthly fees as there are with Medicare, and no copayments or deductibles.
Statists like Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, trumpet the virtues of the bill for limiting the “huge out-of-pocket costs to American families.” In so doing, she repeats the classic error of assuming that a massive change in payment systems with huge distributive effects will have few, if any, effects on the overall levels of utilization. Accordingly, she predicts that total health care costs will go down, even though every independent study from across the political spectrum reaches the opposite conclusion, predicting that overall the price tag for this new set of benefits will range between $25 and $40 trillion in the program’s initial decade. For comparison, the 2010 projections of the costs of Obamacare were consciously limited to under a trillion dollars for the same period of time. Remember this program does more than add people to an already costly Medicare and Medicaid programs. It expands the size of those subsidies as well, apparently on the utopian view that there is never a point where the additional social subsidies cost more than they are worth. Apparently, the money that is left over from funding the Green New Deal and universal student loan forgiveness will cover this modest expense.
People like Angell, Sanders, and Warren fail to appreciate that the central function of any price system is to allocate scarce goods to the people who need and desire them most. This is why all private insurance plans work hard to set the fine line between excessive and ineffective deductibles and copayments. Without financial discipline in the system, hospitals and physicians’ offices will be flooded with well-intentioned patients seeking unnecessary medical care. In this regime, the only way to ration services is to force people to wait in queues. But it is highly unlikely that the people most in need of urgent medical care will be treated first.
The situation is made even worse by two obvious complications: managing health care providers and financing arrangements. Medicare for All would establish an unresponsive state monopoly for providing all essential health services. The bill takes the dramatic step of prohibiting the private provision of “duplicative” services: Since the benefit packages under the legislation are so expansive, there is little place for additional, private care. Don’t ask who sets the fees of physicians and other health care providers because that answer is all too clear—the government. In the absence of reliable information, government will compress salaries so that the best doctors—with their precious human capital—will seek work elsewhere or retire early.
Centralized government control will be insensitive to relevant local variations in niche markets, where a mix of smaller firms have flourished under the Affordable Care Act system. Walk-in clinics like City MD and OneMedical, which are popular in urban areas and offer urgent and primary care services, are a useful example. Moreover, some niche insurers, such as faith-based plans, could not be easily incorporated into a single national health coverage system given the ongoing debate over issues such as contraception and abortion. Do these companies just disappear, or will they be granted exemptions? The answer is not clear, so we should fear the worst.
The foundation of our current health care system lies with large private health care plans that cover about 156 million people, or close to half the population, most of whom give these plans high ratings. It is rash and irresponsible for the elitist defenders of Medicare for All to ignore the stubborn fact that people are happy with their private plans—because they are worth more to them than they cost—and instead force such people into a government program. Yet, Senators Sanders, Booker, Harris, and Warren are so confident that they know more about the needs of ordinary individuals that they are prepared to force their fellow citizens out of their current health care plans into some untested regulatory regime whose design flaws have been systematically overlooked.
Moreover, the decision to ban all private health care insurance without a dime of compensation will wreak havoc on the economy, as trillions of dollars will be drained from the stock market, and thus from private pension plans, institutional endowments, and the savings of ordinary citizens. Shareholders cannot count on any form of compensation to cushion the blow because the government could never raise enough money to pay off such enormous losses.
How will this new government monstrosity be financed? Senate Bill 1129 would require that all revenues paid into Medicare and Medicaid be transferred into the new program, with such revenues constituting only a small down-payment on the total bill. The remaining funds will come through new taxes. But the people who don’t have to make direct contributions to their own plans will be hit hard in other ways. Sanders’ program calls for a 4 percent tax on all incomes over $29,000, and higher income and estate tax rates for higher brackets based on the naïve assumption that output levels will remain constant even as transfer taxes surge.
Harris—who hopes to ease into a Medicare for All system more slowly—wants to reduce the burden of direct taxation through her alternative proposal to “tax Wall Street stock trades at 0.2%, bond trades at 0.1%, and derivative transactions at 0.002%.” Those special taxes will likely drive trading activity from New York to foreign financial centers to minimize the costs. Regardless of whether the activity goes elsewhere, Harris’ proposal will undercut the efficiency of capital markets, as fewer transactions will mean less efficient pricing and therefore lower capital yields, fewer capital investments, lower salaries, and ultimately lower tax revenues.
These criticisms of the different variations of the Medicare for All program should not be construed as an implicit endorsement of the current health care regime. There are massive inefficiencies in the American health care system, many of which stem from the huge regulatory burdens placed by federal and state governments on productive activity. The large expansion of Medicare and Medicaid may please their beneficiaries, but the inevitable overconsumption in medical services such expansion creates will continue unless increased deregulation drives health care reform.
Consider one example: current government mandates on the terms and conditions for health care plans force many people in the private market to get coverage for medical services they don’t want in order to get coverage for the services they do want. But when these mandates are too burdensome, some employer plans will shut down, increasing the number of uninsureds. For instance, proposals to ease up on community rating systems or to offer full coverage for pre-existing conditions face enormous political pushback, leaving the status quo in place. Deregulation would lower administrative costs, subject health care markets to competition, and provide consumers with more agency in their health care decisions.
© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University
Published in Healthcare
He’s as good at this as anyone. He assumes these folks actually believe what they say. I’m not sure they believe in anything except their own power. Bernie Sanders may actually believe what he says but he’s a complete fool. Do folks here think they actually believe the nonsense they say?
Well that post clears up one thing for me. I kept wondering if those listening to Sanders and Warren actually have any grasp of the individual’s current obligations when using Medicare….in other words, 1) that there is (although cheap) a deduction for it just like other insurance showing up on your bank statement every month; that 2) the basic coverage is SO BASIC that most people feel they need to buy a “plan B” and 3) even then, you can run into refusals of coverage and copays. And that to be able to reduce drug costs, you also need to pay for a “plan D.”
I had been assuming the expanded coverage proposals would operate as the existing system does, and that leftist politicians were appealing to younger people who have never been near medicare to be innocently assuming it was currently handing out anything needed to old folks, all for free.
Apparantly the older squad’s call for change would expand coverage and also eliminate the monthly premium. And that alone makes me even more suspicious of its cost.
I ‘d argue that we are losing our health care system to forces just as sinister as the New Left’s government-run Medicare for all proposals.
Our current health care system is good for some things but very bad for others. For broken bones or clear cut major problems like heart attacks and strokes, and for certain everyday infections, our system works fine.
For everything else, health care is a grey area. For so many afflictions, doctors now are mere test advisors and prescribers: get this test and that one. After test results are in, you still have to hope the radiologist is capable of reading the results & does so on a day when they are clear headed and alert.
The Big Pharmaceutical industry holds too much sway over what is happening with various conditions. They’ve captured medicine!
For instance, recently the entire nation was subjected to a measles hysteria, even though anyone conversant with the data found in health surveys from the late 1950’s knows that long before there was a MMR vaccine, there was only a 0.02% death rate from measles.
But Merck had entire lots of MMR vaccine material that was about to expire, so the public was scolded into allowing SCOTUS defying mandates about the need for vaccination. Once the mandates were passed, measles hysteria immediately died out – as it was a fake crisis.
However there are very real & critical conditions that people are dying from. Because there is no radiation/chemo with its $ 80K per year price tag, nor are there $ 400 vaccines, those ailments are ignored.
Once such condition is hemachromatosis, afflicting one in every 200 families in the USA. Often the family affected by the genetic disease does not know about it until several family members have died. Since the condition involves a human body not properly flushing out too much iron, the body traps the iron inside its tissues and organs.
A sufferer often first notices something is not right in their late teens, when they suffer from extreme fatigue. For women, there’s a tendency to go into early menopause, often by age 30. Both sexes can experience heart conditions & fatal heart attacks starting around the age of 30. Often it is a miracle if the person survives until age 55. The cure is a simple one: once diagnosed, the person must make arrangements to periodically be bled at the doctors office, which will flush the extra iron out of their system.
There is no actual gain to Big Pharma, so it is unlikely that there will be universal screening for this disease.
Doctors also often fail to properly diagnose a ruptured appendix, rabies, diverticulitis, and various food-based intolerances. Of course as far as being gluten intolerant, Big Pharma’s execs know full well that if the sufferer can be convinced their body is defective, rather than the diet, then they will use prescription and/or over the counter medications for the rest of their life.