Robert Pollin: Medicare For All, With Money to Spare

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Robert Pollin: Medicare For All, With Money to Spare

21 thoughts on “Robert Pollin: Medicare For All, With Money to Spare

  1. Medicare For All is not an issue for the 2020 presidential democratic primary it is “the” issue. Any 2020 presidential candidate running in the democratic primary will have to fully embrace Med4All to be a viable candidate. Since Bernie Sanders is the strongest advocate for Med4All he is well positioned to standout from the crowd. It will be interesting to watch democratic candidates not supporting Med4All tie themselves in knots trying to layout their position. We won’t have long to wait 2019 is right around the corner.

    • Obviously you have good medical coverage so your children are cared for when they get ill – most people can’t afford it even if working. If you want the Green New Deal & medicare for all, vote Green Party.

    • William Calhoon – yes but the dems will not let Bernie win the primary again so be prepared to vote 3rd party because the others will lie just like Obama did

  2. Good stuff from PERI. Next we need projections of the likely stimulus effects of Medicare for all, which I suspect will be significant as services expand to meet demand. Also, the public health and macroeconomic impacts of transitioning to Medicare for all. Keep up the good work.

  3. Medical treatment for all, Police protection for all…
    Not sure about the numbers but I am pretty sure there is nothing very socialist about it. It would probably free the free market as business and careers don’t go down just because a family member gets sick. It’s good capitalism for the country as a whole.

    • Uilium Powell of course medicare is socialist program – do you know what capitalism means? It is profit driven like insurance companies, hospitals, prescriptions & doctors now. What do you mean police protection for all?

    • +Sandy America is a corporation. it’s good business. It’s practical. It would balance great volatility. Our taxes will go up but we won’t have to pay insurance. The money can come form a more substantial estate tax. Who knows?

    • Uilium Powell wow, that would be a horrible idea! Talk about a market failure. If you can’t afford the police or fire, you wouldn’t use the service. We’d be vigilantes dying preventable deaths, and the police/fire would favor the payer in any conflict. No, we mustn’t start from an assumption that a market economy is ‘good’. It’s not a given.

    • +Olesia StockholdYou mean you can’t read my mind?
      I wasn’t condoning the idea of the happy capitalist police officer, I was showing the comparison.
      Why can’t doctors get paid by the state but doctors can still have incentive to be better doctors, because of things like law suits.
      That’s just an idea, it needs work but I know America can do better somehow.

  4. Yes, look at the money saved by hospitals & doctors when they no longer have to hire a staff to bill, collect & process insurance claims. The displaced workers can be retrained for other admin work. The wealthy executives can live on off-shore accounts & get taxed for every dime spent in USA.

  5. The wealthy executives shouldn’t suffer,
    we should pay for the services that we value.
    What blatant resentment and inability to appreciate someone’s achievements.
    What subtle arrogance.

    Not all executives are PLUNDERING you.

    • I _hate_ that dopey _faux naïveté_ on the part of those, like RJ Eskow, who know, or should know, “where the money comes from”—that is, congressional appropriation. It skews the discourse but, worse, it treats the audience like know-nothing idiots.

      And, related to that, the zombie-like “question” (not explicitly addressed in this video but addressed in the PERI report) of how much taxes need to go _up_ to “pay for” Medicare-for-All—it’s not at all unlikely that, in fact, taxes might have to go _down:_

      “It’s not clear to me the taxes need to go _up_ [to pay for single payer] because we have no idea—nobody has actually looked at this and said, suppose that we downsize the insurance industry so much, as we transition to a single payer, that there are massive job losses and dislocations in the economy. We’re going to lose a lot of people who are currently working in the insurance industry, doing other things for health care administratively and so forth. Those people aren’t going to be doing that work and that means a drag on GDP. Now is there going enough other economic activity to replace it so that the economy continues to grow? Or *might we actually need to cut taxes* because this new program is going to be so cost-saving that it’s going to take demand out of the economy? I think that’s possible. *We might in fact need **_tax cuts_** to pay for single payer.* ”

      —Stephanie Kelton on _Citations Needed_ podcast (54.20), “Episode 11, Part 1: The Deficits Racket – Single Payer Propaganda War,” 27 September 2017

  6. Gonna nitpick an offhand phrase you used, mostly as an excuse to make an argument you’d probably agree with — We don’t spend the most “and yet” not cover everyone or produce the best results on those we do treat – the things are highly correlated, because they have the same cause. Healthcare cannot, morally, be a profit-making business, it’s about human decency and helping people.

    This is also related to all our ‘medicine’ patents we’re so proud of – mostly in the diseases most amenable to placebos, and often with insufficient evidence they are even better than placebo, let alone better than what is already out there.

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