Medicare for All Is an Awful Idea

We hear it every two years – some Democrat promising to solve all your problems by pushing “Medicare for All!” It’s the cure for what ails you, they insist: your health insurance. But there is a lot about the healthcare industry, including insurance, that they don’t tell you. I will.

This year’s model of promising Utopia is Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. He has joined the Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) chorus insisting “free” healthcare is just a vote away. We’ve heard this song before, and we’ve seen it around the world, too. It never ends up well for the people who fall for it.

Abdul was unambiguous about his intentions, pledging to get rid of private health insurance completely for his government takeover. But what works well in Democrat primaries doesn’t necessarily sell all that well to normal people, and most people like their health coverage. They may not like the price, which is the fault of Obamacare and the regulations put in place when Democrats “fixed” healthcare just 16 years ago, but the care they receive largely pleases them. Most people aren’t Luigi Mangione, ready to murder because they don’t like the insurance they have. (Ironically, Luigi comes from one of the wealthiest families in Maryland and, undoubtedly, had either great coverage or could have paid cash, but progressive politics had him choosing murder.)

But even people happy with their coverage can’t escape the media coverage of “evil insurance companies,” which is where you get “voters are unhappy about their healthcare” from. “Insurance companies are evil, even though I like mine” is the concept.

Now, Abdul is saying you can keep your insurance, if you want, in his version of Medicare for All. But the concept of “for All” is pretty clear – it means everyone is in it. Otherwise, we currently have Medicare, and we currently have private healthcare, which leads you to wonder what it is Abdul is really proposing.

He’s lying, of course; he has no desire for private healthcare to continue to exist – his wife won’t even take it or Medicare or Medicaid, preferring to serve rich patients who have the cash for her services.

Medicare for All and private healthcare can’t co-exist. If government-provided entitlement programs are opened to everyone, companies would be insane to provide private coverage while carrying the added tax burden needed to pay for the program. If people were tagged with premium support that allowed them to either choose Medicare or private insurance – like a school voucher program, most people would take their voucher to the private sector, as outcomes and satisfaction for serious illnesses are much higher in the private sector.

That means that will NEVER be an option.

Republicans once proposed something similar, allowing seniors to choose between traditional Medicare and private insurance with the premium support they would get in Medicare, in the late 90s. Democrats screamed bloody murder – looping a clip of Newt Gingrich acknowledging how Medicare would “wither on the vine” if seniors were given the option to get out of it. The context was a lie, which the Clintons gleefully cheered on by saying Republicans wanted to kill Medicare, and a chance for meaningful reform was dead.

How’d that work out again?

Once you get rid of private insurance by making it illegal, it’s not coming back. As the saying goes, you can vote your way into socialism; you can’t vote your way out of it. No one will invest the billions needed to recreate the insurance infrastructure we have now once it is wiped out because it could easily be wiped out again.

Abdul is following the Obama playbook of “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. And if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” lie, knowing full well they were going to make millions of plans illegal through regulation, robbing what ended up being five million Americans of their doctors and plans. They knew what they were doing; they didn’t care. The lie was useful; the means justified by the end.

Abdul is no different. Democrats don’t have new ideas; they have new schemes to con people into buying into them. Will they work this time? I sure hope not. But Republicans need to actually and actively message against it and point out how Democrats are promising to fix again a system they “fixed” before, a system they set up and broke in the first place.

I hope Republicans can.

Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, D.C., and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and is the author of the book Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and the host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.

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