By Charles Blahous
Mercatus Center, July 30, 2018

Abstract

The leading current bill to establish single-payer health insurance, the Medicare for All Act (M4A – Senator Bernie Sanders), would, under conservative estimates, increase federal budget commitments by approximately $32.6 trillion during its first 10 years of full implementation (2022–2031), assuming enactment in 2018. This projected increase in federal healthcare commitments would equal approximately 10.7 percent of GDP in 2022, rising to nearly 12.7 percent of GDP in 2031 and further thereafter. Doubling all currently projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections would be insufficient to finance the added federal costs of the plan. It is likely that the actual cost of M4A would be substantially greater than these estimates, which assume significant administrative and drug cost savings under the plan, and also assume that healthcare providers operating under M4A will be reimbursed at rates more than 40 percent lower than those currently paid by private health insurance.

Increased Demand and Utilization

M4A would increase healthcare demand and utilization in at least three important ways. First, the plan would provide health insurance coverage to all Americans who are currently uninsured, greatly increasing their utilization of healthcare services. Coverage of the currently uninsured is estimated to increase their health service costs by roughly 89 percent.

Second, the plan would expand the range of services covered by existing insurance, explicitly covering dental, vision, and hearing care for all participants. This, too, would increase utilization of such services in addition to shifting their financing from private to public spending, especially for those now reliant on traditional Medicare.

Finally, the plan’s requirement that “no cost-sharing, including deductibles, coinsurance, copayments, or similar charges, be imposed on an individual” would also significantly increase healthcare utilization. Providing this first-dollar coverage is estimated to induce 11 percent additional demand for those currently covered by private insurance and 16 percent for those now in traditional Medicare without supplemental coverage.

Provider Payment Reductions

To offset the substantial cost increases created by stimulating additional consumer demand for and utilization of healthcare, the M4A bill would constrain expenditures by subjecting healthcare providers—including hospitals, physicians, and others—to Medicare payment rates. Under current law, Medicare reimburses healthcare providers at much lower rates than private health insurance does. In 2014, Medicare hospital payment rates were 62 percent of private insurance payment rates and are currently projected to decline to below 60 percent by the time M4A would be implemented, and to decline further afterward. Medicare physician payment rates were 75 percent of private insurance rates in 2016 and, per the terms of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA), are projected to decline sharply in relative terms in future years, also falling below 60 percent within the first full decade of M4A.

The adoption of Medicare payment rates would represent a substantial reduction in provider reimbursements for care provided to everyone now covered by private insurance (though it would also be a temporary increase in physician payments for those now covered by Medicaid, which currently pays physicians at lower rates than does Medicare).

Drug Costs

This analysis credits the M4A proposal with approximately $846 billion in additional savings over the 2022–2031 period from negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs.

Administrative Savings

This analysis assumes substantial administrative cost savings generated by replacing private insurance with national single-payer insurance, specifically a reduction of seven percentage points (from an estimated 13 percent to 6 percent) in the administrative cost of covering those now holding private insurance.

Current administrative cost rates for Medicare as a whole are cited as being roughly 4 percent, though closer to 6 percent for Medicare Advantage. It is unlikely that the population now privately insured could be covered by M4A with administrative costs as low as 4 percent.

Long-Term Services and Supports

The M4A bill contains a “maintenance of effort” provision requiring states to continue their LTSS expenditures under Medicaid at current-law levels, automatically indexing the growth of these commitments going forward.

Effects on National Health Expenditures and the Federal Budget

Table 2 summarizes the financial effects of the M4A bill over its first 10 years of full implementation, which would be 2022 through 2031 if enacted in 2018. One striking finding evident in the table is that, even under the assumption that provider payments for treating patients now covered by private insurance are reduced by over 40 percent, aggregate health expenditures remain virtually unchanged: national personal healthcare costs decrease by less than 2 percent, while total health expenditures decrease by only 4 percent, even after assuming substantial administrative cost savings. The additional healthcare demand that arises from eliminating copayments, providing additional categories of benefits, and covering the currently uninsured nearly offsets potential savings associated with cutting provider payments and achieving lower drug costs. Thus, the essential expenditure change wrought by movement to a single-payer system would be to replace private spending on healthcare with government spending financed by taxpayers. At the same time, more generous healthcare insurance would be provided to everyone at the expense of healthcare providers, who would face reimbursements substantially below their service costs.

While these estimates show little net change in NHE, the same cannot be said of the projected effects on the federal budget. Table 2 includes an estimate for the net increase in federal health budget commitments of $32.6 trillion from 2022 through 2031, which, by itself, is more than all federal individual and corporate income taxes projected to be collected during that time period.

It should be noted that M4A’s elimination of employer-sponsored insurance, including the federal tax preferences now accorded to it, should increase worker wages net of employer- provided health benefits. These estimates incorporate the increased federal revenues CBO projects to arise from subjecting these higher expected wages to federal taxation. Thus, at the same time that M4A would dramatically increase federal spending, it would increase taxable worker wages net of employer-provided benefits, while also relieving individuals, families, and employers of the substantial health expenditures they would experience under current law. It would also relieve states of such Medicaid expenditure obligations as are transferred to the federal government. These offsetting effects should be considered when weighing the implications of requiring federal taxpayers to finance the enormous federal expenditure increases under M4A. These estimates should be understood as projecting the added federal cost commitments under M4A, as distinct from its net effect on the federal deficit. To the extent that the cost of M4A is financed by new payroll taxes, premium collections, or other revenue increases, the net effect on the federal budget deficit would be substantially less.

https://www.mercatus.org…

***

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

This and other analyses of Senator Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All Act should not be considered definitive since the bill is not complete and there still is considerable disagreement on the specifics of the bill. The bill will certainly not become law in its present form.

That said, this analysis is not that much different from previous analyses from the Urban Institute and from Emory’s Kenneth Thorpe, both of which contain disputed assumptions, as does this analysis. Considering the similarities, it is interesting that this was done by the Mercatus Center’s Charles Blahous. The mission of Mercatus is “to generate knowledge and understanding of the institutions that affect the freedom to prosper.” Charles Koch is a member of its board.

The media is covering this analysis with headlines that Medicare for All would cost a “stunning $32.6 trillion,” “ridiculously expensive,” “over $32 trillion with a T,” “massive tax increases,” etc. The Mercatus release and the paper’s abstract also emphasize the resulting federal budget commitments. The $32.6 trillion federal spending is for the entire decade of 2022-2031.

Much more important is the total national health expenditures (NHE). Buried in the report, but left out of the media coverage, is this statement: “aggregate health expenditures remain virtually unchanged: national personal healthcare costs decrease by less than 2 percent, while total health expenditures decrease by only 4 percent.” Also, “the essential expenditure change wrought by movement to a single-payer system would be to replace private spending on healthcare with government spending financed by taxpayers. At the same time, more generous healthcare insurance would be provided to everyone.”

Thus they are not claiming that total national health expenditures will increase when compared to current projections, but only that much of our current private spending will shift to the government-administered Medicare for All with the benefit that everyone will be covered with a more generous program. That is a tremendous plus.

There are several problems with this study, but here I’ll mention just a couple.

Blahous predicts an 89 percent increase in costs for the previously uninsured. But he leaves out the fact that other transitions to single payer, such as that in Canada, resulted in a shift of care to those with greater needs. Excess care that was of little value that was provided to the wealthier “worried well” declined, but without any decrease in truly beneficial health care services and thus without adverse outcomes. Attention must still be given to ensuring adequate capacity in the system while avoiding wasteful excess capacity, but we can be assured that there will not be an abrupt increase in excessive queues for essential health care services. Or to Blahous’ point, because of this offset, increased access for the uninsured and underinsured will not result in a dramatic increase in health care spending.

Blahous states that there will be a 40 percent reduction in physician and hospital payment rates compared to private insurance. (He does provide an alternate analysis in which this reduction does not take place.) Although rates will be negotiated and publicly administered (ideally with global budgeting of hospitals), and there should be some increased efficiency in allocation of services (see prior paragraph), we can look to Canada to see what would likely happen. In actuality, there was little net change in income due to the implementation of the provincial single payer systems. We can expect the same here (though eight figure physician incomes will likely not be tolerated).

For an analysis of single payer, Blahous really misses the boat on recovery of administrative waste. He credits a savings of 7 percent of only the administrative cost of covering those now holding private insurance, but ignores all of the other profound administrative excesses that characterize our fragmented, dysfunctional health care financing system. For the first year of full implementation of Medicare for All (2022), he calculates a mere $78 billion in administrative savings, far less than the hundreds of billions that likely would be saved if the ultimate legislation were designed properly.

The link above is to the full Blahous analysis. You may want to save it to be able to show Medicare for All opponents what he actually concluded. Blahous, a conservative/libertarian economist, tells us that Medicare for All will not increase our spending and yet will include everyone and provide them with a much more generous program. Both Republicans and Democrats need to hear this message.

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By Michael Batty, Christa Gibbs, and Benedic Ippolito
Health Affairs, July 25, 2018 (published ahead of print)

Abstract

Health policy is often designed to help protect patients’ financial security. However, there is limited understanding of the role medical debt plays in household finances. We used credit report data on more than four million Americans to study the age profile of people whose medical bills were sent to a US collections agency in 2016. We found that, unlike health care use and spending, medical collections decreased substantially with age. The average size of medical debt decreased nearly 40 percent from patients age twenty-seven to sixty-four, with increases in health insurance coverage and incomes likely playing important mediating roles. However, the frequency of medical collections—that is, the proportion of people with a collection by age—was less closely tied to insurance coverage rates. A potential explanation is that most medical collections were relatively modest in size, with more than half of them less than $600 annually. As a result, medical collections could still occur under typical insurance plans. We discuss how these results could inform policies targeting medical debt and insurance regulation, such as restrictions on age rating.

From the Introduction

Using deidentified credit report data on more than four million people, we found that the frequency (proportion of people with a medical collection by age) and size of medical collections peak in the late twenties and decline as age increases. This pattern is similar to that of the percentage of people without health insurance by age, but it differs markedly from the sharp rise in medical spending by age.

Furthermore, while the average size of medical collections exhibits a close relationship with uninsurance rates by age, the portion of people who actually incur any medical debt within a given year does not decline as much at older ages as uninsurance rates do. We augment these findings by showing that many annual medical collections are relatively modest in size (more than half under $600). Insurance typically reduces what patients are asked to pay, but if it includes nontrivial cost sharing, patients may still face bills they cannot afford or do not pay. This may both limit consumers’ demand for insurance and temper expectations for how much all but very generous forms of universal coverage would reduce the medical debt we observed.

From the Policy Implications

As prior research has shown, our results suggest that health insurance is associated with medical debt. In addition, we found that younger adults are more likely than their older peers to have medical collections, despite having lower medical spending. Thus, policies that promote insurance coverage for younger adults may have the greatest effect on reducing medical collections. One such policy is the oft-debated limitation on age rating in the ACA Marketplaces for individual insurance coverage. An actuarially fair system would charge the oldest enrollees premiums closer to five times those of the youngest, compared to the current three-to-one age rating cap. Relaxing this limitation could lower premiums for younger consumers and boost coverage in a group that currently incurs the most medical debt, though at a cost of higher premiums and potentially increased medical debt for older people. The extent to which this would alter the total amount of debt or simply redistribute it in part hinges on consumers’ responsiveness to health insurance premiums and wealth differences across age groups.

While our results suggest that insurance is important for reducing the dollar amount of unpaid debts, they also imply that consumers could still incur a substantial amount of debt even under universal coverage, if such coverage required nontrivial cost sharing. This is consistent with data from the 2016 National Health Interview Survey, which show that 72 percent of the patients ages 20–65 who reported not being able to pay medical bills were insured. Thus, one option is for policy makers to further limit allowable levels of cost sharing (for example, restricting the availability of “catastrophic” plans or requiring higher actuarial values more broadly). However, all else equal, this would increase the price of insurance, potentially discouraging the most price-sensitive consumers from purchasing coverage and raising concerns about moral hazard. Policy makers could increase subsidies to offset the price increases, but this may face political opposition, given recent evidence.

If policy makers are committed to the provision of insurance with substantial cost sharing, as has become increasingly common in many employer-sponsored plans and in the ACA individual market, reducing medical collections would require policy efforts to increase funds available to pay bills—either by increasing after-tax incomes or by promoting savings. Although health savings accounts are the most prominent health-specific savings vehicle, their tax-advantaged structure is considerably less valuable to the lower-income people who likely constitute more of the population with medical debt than higher-income people do. As a result, a continued focus on this type of policy would likely have muted effects on the medical debt of lower-income people.

Finally, consideration of the size distribution of medical debt is important for policies aimed at increasing insurance coverage. For example, Amy Finkelstein and coauthors argue that the availability of uncompensated care reduces the cost of being uninsured (though not fully) and may cause people to not purchase insurance even when the subsidized price is far below their own expected medical expenses. Similarly, Neale Mahoney argues that bankruptcy offers some implicit health insurance for those without formal insurance. Our results indicate that most medical debts are relatively modest in size, which means that they could be incurred before the insured person meets their deductible. Thus, the channels that decrease demand for insurance may be in effect for a wider range of medical expenses than previously thought.

***

Health Affairs Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

The discussion of policy implications really needs to be expanded.

The two primary causes of medical debt that results in collections include being uninsured, which calls for policies that would make coverage truly universal, and underinsurance with excessive patient cost sharing resulting in medical debt.

Most policy discussions of the latter seem to accept consumer directed health care as a given – making the patient sensitive to health care spending through higher deductibles and other cost sharing. This results in policy recommendations that do not eliminate the medical debt issue but rather use trade-offs that only shift the problems, often inequitably.

As an example, setting premiums closer to age-related risk would increase medical debt problems for older individuals, not really a desirable policy. Another example is that increased use of medical savings accounts increases tax expenditures that benefit the wealthy – a highly inequitable method of financing health care that is unfair to our taxpayers. Solutions that are directed to moral hazard and consumer price sensitivity do not solve the problems but merely shift them around.

Exhibit 3 provides a very important lesson. At age 65 there is an abrupt decline in the numbers of uninsured, obviously due to increased enrollment in Medicare. But also within a couple of years medical collections become almost negligible, most likely due to the fact that the deficiencies in Medicare coverage are filled in by other coverage including retiree plans, Medigap plans, Medicare Advantage plans, or dual coverage with Medicaid. This suggests that, instead of increasing administrative complexity and costs through the use of these various supplemental plans, Medicare benefits should be expanded to fill in the gaps in coverage if we want to protect patients from medical debt.

Improving Medicare and expanding it to cover everyone would not only address the medical debt issue, it would also make coverage truly universal, and it would be funded equitably through progressive tax policies. Regarding affordability, the policies characteristic of a well-designed single payer system would use other more patient-friendly measures to control spending such as reduction of our profound administrative waste, use of publicly administered pricing such as negotiated rates and bulk purchasing, and planning and separate budgeting of capital improvements to ensure efficient distribution of our health care delivery resources.

These policies would change the cost trajectory to make it sustainable, not only to benefit individuals but society as a whole. That does not remove the major barrier to reform that the authors also allude to – the political opposition to government financing, even though the decrease in private financing, especially employer-sponsored plans and plans in the individual market that disproportionately burden individuals with modest or low incomes, is a major reason that public insurance systems work so well. To enact the beneficial policies that we need for an equitable, affordable health care financing system for all, we need to change the politics.

https://www.healthaffairs.org…

***

Further Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

An important theme that runs throughout this article: “consumers could still incur a substantial amount of debt even under universal coverage, if such coverage required nontrivial cost sharing.”

Nontrivial cost sharing is the primary cause of medical debt in insured individuals. Deductibles, coinsurance and often copayments are usually more than trivial in today’s private insurance products.

Several other nations have shown that cost sharing has not been necessary to keep health care spending rates at a level well below that of the United States. Cost sharing in the United States has not kept us from spending the most on health care, and it has created unnecessary exposure to medical debt.

We really can provide health care to everyone for free at the point of service while controlling costs though single payer policies that are much more patient friendly and much more effective than consumer-directed cost sharing, and we can pay for the system painlessly through equitable, progressive public financing.

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Commonwealth Club, July 25, 2018

Seema Verma: Americans enjoy the benefits of the best health care providers and innovators in the world. Yet while the volume of care consumed by American patients has not increased dramatically compared to similar economies, the cost of care in the United States has accelerated at an alarming pace. Health care costs are growing faster than the United States GDP, making it more difficult with each passing year for CMS to ensure health care for generations to come.

The status quo is simply unsustainable, and there is no easy solution. Anyone who tells you that more government spending alone can fix this problem doesn’t understand the issue, because despite the huge increase in funding we saw from Obamacare, many of our health care challenges not only remain but continue to worsen. As a country, we have not figured out how to slow the rate of growth in health care spending.

***

Before I conclude…I want to address one additional issue.

We have all heard the drumbeat for what advocates of a government-run – socialized – health care system call “Medicare for All.” Let me briefly explain why this notion reveals a fundamental lack of understanding about the uniqueness of Medicare to the very specific population that it serves.

First, Medicare is a program to provide care to our most vulnerable, disabled and aging population that needs it. Second, by proposing to expand services offered by Medicare to every American, you further strain Medicare’s funding streams and run the risk of depriving seniors of the coverage they have worked their entire lives to receive.

We have just discussed the challenges that Medicare faces in serving the nation’s seniors, the misaligned financial systems that are driving up costs, and the bureaucratic hurdles faced by doctors and hospitals. We have a lot of work to do to strengthen the existing Medicare program. Putting millions more Americans on Medicare will undermine the health care for the very demographic the program is designed to assist. Ideas like “Medicare for All” would only serve to hurt and divert focus from seniors, all the while expanding the regulatory burden and the misaligned and perverse incentives of a government-run system.

In essence, Medicare for All would become Medicare for None.

By choosing a socialized system, you’re giving the government complete control over the decisions pertaining to your care or whether you receive care at all. It would be the furthest thing from patient-centric care.

Let’s learn from the mistakes made in Medicaid when the Affordable Care Act pushed millions of able-bodied Americans into a program designed for pregnant women, children, aged, and those with disabilities, only to then incentivize states to serve the able-bodied before protecting Americans most in need. We have seen this movie, and the last thing we need to see is the sequel.

I seriously hope those who advocate it take time to understand the complexity of the program and the adverse consequences of their proposal.

Rather than straining Medicare, we are working to strengthen Medicare. We are activating patients to be consumers of health care, to drive providers to compete for patients by innovating and providing value. We are getting rid of burdensome regulations that are barriers to value-based care while realigning incentives so that providers can focus on delivering care that improves quality and lowers cost.

We are running out of time to solve the challenges of our health care system. Not addressing health care costs not only threatens the future of the Medicare program but our country’s future. This administration will never stop driving our system towards delivering value for the patient. This will take every single part of the health care system working together to ensure that we continue to drive towards value. Everybody will need to do their part to create a value-based system, but we need you to do your part as well. Please engage with us. We need and want your ideas and your unique perspective. At some point, we’re all going to be Medicare beneficiaries, so let’s work together to strengthen the program and leverage that strength for the future of our entire health care delivery system. This is not a luxury, but a necessity. The prosperity and the well-being of future generations is dependent on the decisions that we make today. So join us as we ensure those decisions will benefit all Americans. Thank you.

***

Q&A Session:

Mark Zitter, Moderator: I’d like to turn to the bigger issue that people have brought up and that you raised about single payer health care. I’m not going to ask the question that you already answered. I know the administration is not in favor of it. I do find that many people confuse single payer health care with universal coverage – not the same thing. Many countries have both – not the same thing. So clearly the administration is not in favor of a single payer approach; what’s the Trump administration’s feeling about everybody having health care coverage.

Seema Verma: I think we’ve always said that we want to make sure that people have access to coverage. That’s always been a goal of the administration. I just don’t think the government is the one to make decisions for each and every American. People need to make decisions about health care on their own. They need to have choices and options and they need to make the decisions that are going to work best for them. We don’t think the the government should be making decisions about individual families and for people about their health care. That should come from the individual.

Mark Zitter: And when you say “access to coverage,” is that the same as coverage?

(Audience laughter)

Seema Verma: We want people to have access to coverage, and I don’t…I think we’ve been very clear about making sure that, you know, that there’s access in a lot of different ways. What we’ve had through Obamacare is a type of plan – a very expensive plan that lots of people can’t afford. Different people want different types of plans, and I think they should be able to make the choices – decide what’s going to work best for them.

Mark Zitter: So we have through the Affordable Care Act about half the number of uninsured in America. We still have eight or nine percent, whatever that might be, and granted the coverage for everyone is not optimal, so just being covered is not all that we need. However we still have eight or nine percent, more in some states, less in others; what’s the Trump administration’s plans to get that number up pretty close to one hundred.

Seema Verma: So a couple things that we’ve done…What we’re seeing in the exchanges is that the coverage has become very expensive, and for people that are subsidized, they’re not necessarily experiencing issues in terms of getting access to the coverage; they still may having a lot of problems in affording the out-of-pocket expenses and the very high deductibles. But a lot of people cannot afford the coverage; they are not able to get subsidies. And so one of the things that we’re trying to do is to make certain that there is different types of options available, providing more flexibility – short term limited duration plans; we put out a rule for association health plans. The idea is to create more flexibility and more options for consumers to be able to have different choices, because I don’t think that everybody can afford the one-size-fits-all Obamacare approach – a very expensive plan that’s leaving out millions of Americans.

Mark Zitter: We just heard over the past week in terms of the association health plans – there have been some new rules there. One of the groups that was most in favor of it didn’t feel like the new rules were sufficient for it to pursue. So are there other plans to do something else in that regard?

Seema Verma: We’re always going to be continuing to drive towards getting Americans options. I think the way Obamacare is structured, it’s a one-size-fits-all approach, and so you’re going to see action by the agency, and I think that’s what the president, in terms of his executive order, wants to make sure there is different types of plans available, that people have choices about their care.

Mark Zitter: One of the statements that the president has made that has gotten a lot of excitement on the right, and increasing interest on the left, is the notion of giving states much more flexibility in how they administer health care to their residents. There’s concern on the left that maybe states won’t do what they want overall, but of course you’ve talked about experimentation… Here in California, as you probably heard, we have a gubernatorial race. Most candidates are running on some kind of platform about single payer health care on a statewide basis. Plenty of challenge to that, but I guess my question to you is that should that platform go forward it would require, I suppose, waivers from the federal government so the money that currently flows through your department would be put into the California single payer pool. Should that happen… should that be requested, what would be your feeling about granting California that flexibility?

Seema Verma: I don’t think a single payer system is going to work, number one. I think that a lot of the analyses show us that it’s unaffordable, and that it would actually put many people in the situation where the government is making decisions about their health care. We’ve been consistent that we support flexibility, but when we look at proposals, we evaluate them to see are they fiscally sustainable, are they fiscally sustainable for the federal government as well as the states, and when we’re evaluating proposals that’s what we’re looking at, we’re looking to see whether the proposal falls within the confines of the law. But it doesn’t make sense for us to waste time on something that is not going to work.

Mark Zitter: So that’ll be a no.

Seema Verma: Like I said, our parameters are that it has to be fiscally sustainable for the federal government.

https://www.commonwealthclub.org…

YouTube video (1 hour, 7 minutes):
https://m.youtube.com…

Transcript of prepared speech:
https://www.cms.gov…

***

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

This speech was primarily the rhetorical spin that this administration has been spewing out – much conservative and libertarian ideology with a paucity of health policy recommendations that are largely ineffective and often detrimental. Medicare for All advocates should be particularly concerned about what she has to say.

To no surprise, she dismisses Medicare for All with what she believes to be an inflammatory label: “socialized.” She then accuses advocates of not understanding Medicare. She says that that Medicare for all would risk removing resources from current Medicare beneficiaries, which of course is the opposite of the truth since it would expand benefits. She insists that it is unaffordable, ignoring the fact that increased government spending would be offset by the reduction in private health care spending.

Confirming that her speech is rhetorical, lacking in any beneficial policy substance, she concludes by saying, “Medicare for All would become Medicare for None.”

The conservatives have long supported giving the states a much greater role in regulation and financing of health care, contending that the states are in a better position to make decisions about health care for their people. Yet showing that she is much more driven by ideology than by policy, she insists that a single payer system is not going to work regardless, that it would be unaffordable, which all studies show is absolutely untrue when looking at total health care spending. She says that though she supports flexibility, she is not going to “waste time on something that is not going to work.”

As the moderator Mark Zitter says, “So that’ll be a no.”

I found it very painful to listen to this speech. I left out of the transcript that I typed her little joke about world peace, which to me only compounded the pain – joking about peace, of all things. (The audience didn’t laugh either.)

These people will never understand the ethics and morality of an egalitarian health care system that brings health care justice to all. We need to replace them with people who do understand and who care.

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Conducted July 17-22, 2018

Thinking about the upcoming election, is a candidate’s position on “passing a national health plan in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan, or Medicare-for-all” the single most important factor in your vote, very important but not the most important factor, one of many factors you’ll consider, or not an important factor in your vote?

12% – Single most important factor
37% – Very important, but not the most important factor
29% – One of the many factors you’ll consider
21% – Not an important factor in your vote
2% – Don’t know/Refused

http://files.kff.org…

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Morning Consult + POLITICO National Tracking Poll

Conducted July 19-23, 2018

How important of a priority should each of the following be for Congress? Passing a healthcare reform bill

55% – A top priority
25% – An important, but lower priority
6% – Not too important a priority
5% – Should not be done
9% – Don’t know/No opinion

https://www.politico.com…

***

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

In the Kaiser poll over three-fourths say that a single government plan or Medicare-for-all should be considered or is very important or the single most important factor in the upcoming election. In the Morning Consult/POLITICO poll three-fourths say that passing a health care reform bill is an important or top priority, with over half saying it is a top priority.

As a topmost priority, generic health care reform seems to have greater support than a single government plan or Medicare for all, but both concepts do have three-fourths majority support. That’s enough to make legitimate health care reform a litmus test in the coming election, and what could be more legitimate than an improved Medicare for all? Let’s get the word out.

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