Ahead of this week’s round of Democratic presidential debates, former vice president Joe Biden continued his attacks on Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ single-payer health plan. Biden said it would undermine people currently receiving coverage through Obamacare:
Like so many other Americans, Marcy prefers to keep her private insurance while recognizing that a public health insurance option is necessary for some of her friends and family. pic.twitter.com/1PnfSGC5WC
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 26, 2019
In response, Sanders’s campaign accused Biden of using “insurance company scare tactics.” This week’s debates will see similar sets of allegations. Opponents of immediate single-payer will attack the disruption caused by a transition to socialized medicine, while supporters call single-payer skeptics pawns of the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, or both.
But the dueling sets of insults amount to little more than a sideshow. As these pages have previously argued, most Democrats ultimately want to get to a government-run system—they only differ on how quickly to throw Americans off their current health coverage. A series of recently released figures provide further proof of this theory.
200 Million Americans on Government-Run Health Care
Last week, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released some results of an analysis performed by Avalere Health regarding their “Medicare Extra” proposal. That plan, first released in February 2018, would combine enrollees in Medicaid and the Obamacare exchanges into one large government-run health plan.
Under the CAP plan, employers could choose to keep their current coverage offerings, but employees could “cash-out” the amount of their employer’s insurance contribution and put it towards the cost of the government-run plan. Likewise, seniors could convert from existing Medicare to the “new” government-run plan.
In reviewing the Avalere analysis, Vox claimed that the CAP plan is “designed to…step gingerly around people’s fear of change and mistrust of the government”—an ironic statement on multiple levels. First, CAP provided the Avalere analysis “exclusively” to Vox. While Avalere published the methodology for the study on its site, it has not released the study’s full results, nor has CAP. If CAP wants to assuage citizens’ mistrust of government, hiding the full results of a study it commissioned seems a funny way to accomplish its goals.
More to the point: The study concluded that, within a decade, nearly 200 million Americans would obtain coverage from this new, supercharged, government-run health plan:
As the chart demonstrates, the new government-run plan would suck enrollees from other forms of coverage, including at least 14 million who would lose insurance because their employer stopped offering it. By comparison, Barack Obama’s infamous “If you like your plan, you can keep it” broken promise resulted in a mere 4.7 million Americans receiving cancellation notices in late 2013.
In addition, the existing Medicare program would shrink by more than half, from 81 million down to 33 million enrollees. The chart from Avalere’s analysis of the CAP plan echoes a similar graphic published by the Lewin Group a decade ago. That analysis found that a government-run health plan open to all Americans and reimbursing at Medicare rates could lead up to 119.1 million Americans to lose their current coverage.
Neither Plan Is a Moderate Solution
Whether 119.1 million Americans losing their private coverage, or 200 million Americans driven onto a government-run plan, none of these studies, nor any of these supposedly “incremental” and “moderate” plans, shows anything but a massive erosion of private health care provision, and a massive expansion of government-run health care.
Case in point: Earlier this year, Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) introduced a version of the CAP plan as H.R. 2452, the Medicare for America bill. As I wrote in June, the version of the legislation reintroduced this year completely bans private health care.
Under their legislation, individuals could not just pay their doctor $50 or $100 to treat an ailment like the flu or a sprained ankle. The legislation would prohibit—yes, prohibit—doctors from treating patients on a “cash-and-carry” basis, without federal bureaucrats and regulations involved.
Whether the Medicare for America bill, the CAP proposal, or Biden’s proposal for a government-run health plan, all these plans will eventually lead to full-on socialized medicine. Sanders has the wrong solutions for health policy (and much else besides), but at least he, unlike Biden, wins points for honesty about his ultimate goals.
