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Jake966 This Medicare For All semantics mash-up -- intended to win support for universal health care since most people are satisfied with Medicare -- has just confused the issues involved.
1. Health care will not become more affordable until the cost is spread over everyone like auto insurance is. Otherwise the mostly healthy young people will continue to go without health insurance because they figure they don't need it, leaving the older people who can least afford it (and the young who are surprised with cataclysmic health crises) to foot the high end costs for either risk-adjusted health insurance or property tax payers in public hospitals.
2. As long as we cling to the fable of Marcus Welby fee-for-service medicine, making house calls and living totally by the Hippocratic Oath of do no harm and being a Good Samaritan, the health care system is going to be fraught with layer upon layer of mark-up profit for and gotcha games between for-profit insurers and hospitals and doctors -- not to mention the great opportunities for fraud at every transaction.
3. We need a universal health care system to spread the costs over the entire population because we are all going to need that health care system at some juncture. We need to move away from the fee-for-service, piece-rate billing system that even Medicare uses, and all the risks and abuses it brings with it. Any one for a $30 bandaid, or an unneeded tonsillectomy? The Affordable Care Act actually had steps to move in that direction, where provider networks would be encouraged to work in treatment teams and would be paid for treatment modalities, competing on terms of quality, outcomes, cost, and service in the marketplace rather than cost alone. And it actually did take the first step in mandating minimum levels of coverage by health plans, screening out the el cheapo for profit rip off insurers who collect premiums and pay for very little if anything after pre-existing conditions, high co-pays, and every exclusion they can think of. But nearly two decades of obstruct has derailed that as the confusion over the terms Medicare and Universal Health Care are doing now.
