Last month, Kennedy was asked if he would support "universal health care through a Medicare for All program." In his response, Kennedy shifted the goalposts in a more moderate direction, redefining "single-payer" health care to mean something more like the Obama/Biden "public option" proposal. He said, "my highest ambition would be to have a single-payer program where people who want to have private programs can go ahead and do that, but to have a single program that is available to everybody."
Bernie Sanders: Last year at least 30,000 people died in America because they didn't get healthcare when they should, because we don't have universal coverage. I think that's a crisis. One out of five people in America cannot afford the prescription drugs they need. They suffer. Some die. I consider that a crisis. Bottom line is we need a simple system, which exists in Canada, exists in countries all over the world, and that is if you are an American, you get the healthcare you need, end of discussion.
Sen. Amy KLOBUCHAR: I think it is much better to build on the Affordable Care Act. If you want to be practical and progressive at the same time and have a plan and not a pipedream, you have to show how you're going to pay for it. I think you should show how you're going to pay for things, Bernie. I do.
BIDEN: I think we should have a debate on health care. I think Obamacare worked. I think the way we add to it, replace everything that has been cut, add a public option, guarantee that everyone will be able to have affordable insurance, number one. Number two, I think we should look at cost. My plan costs $740 billion. It doesn't cost $30 trillion, $3.4 trillion a year, it turns out, is twice what the entire federal budget is. How are we going to pay for it? Thus far, Senator Warren has not indicated how she pays for it.
Sen. Elizabeth WARREN: Pres. Obama transformed health care. Now, how best can we improve it? I believe the best way we can do that is we make sure everybody gets covered by health care at the lowest possible cost. How do we pay for it? Those at the very top, the richest individuals and the biggest corporations, are going to pay more. And middle class families are going to pay less.
SANDERS: Every study done shows that Medicare for All is the most cost-effective approach to providing health care to every man, woman, and child in this country. I intend to eliminate all out-of-pocket expenses, all deductibles, all co-payments. Nobody in America will pay more than $200 a year for prescription drugs, because we're going to stand up to the greed and corruption and price-fixing of the pharmaceutical industry.
Vice President Joe BIDEN: Anyone who can't afford it gets automatically enrolled in the Medicare-type option we have. But guess what? Of the 160 million people who like their health care now, they can keep it.
Sen. Mike BENNET: Bernie has said over and over again that this [single-payer Medicare-for-All plan] will make illegal all insurance except cosmetic--I guess that's for plastic surgery. Everything else is banned under the Medicare-for-all proposal.
Sen. Bernie SANDERS: You know, Mike, Medicare is the most popular health insurance program in the country.
BENNET: I agree.
SANDERS: People don't like their private insurance companies. They like their doctors and hospitals. Under our plan people go to any doctor they want, any hospital they want. We will substantially lower the cost of health care in this country because we'll stop the greed of the insurance companies. On this issue we have to think about how this affects real people.
SANDERS: Every other major country on Earth, including my neighbor 50 miles north of me, Canada, somehow has figured out a way to provide health care to every man, woman, and child, and in most cases, they're spending 50% per capita of what we are spending.
Q: How do you implement it on a national level, given the fact that other states have not succeeded?
SANDERS: We'll do it the way real change has always taken place. We will have Medicare-for-All when tens of millions of people are prepared to stand up and tell the insurance companies and the drug companies that their day is gone, that health care is a human right, not something to make huge profits off of.
But many of the candidates--even official "Medicare-for-all" co-sponsors--are at the same time edging toward a more incremental approach, called "Medicare for America." This proposed Medicare for America system would guarantee universal coverage, but leave job-based insurance available for those who want it. Unlike "Medicare-for-all," though, it would preserve premiums and deductibles, so beneficiaries would still have to pay some costs out-of-pocket.
In practice, the Democratic Party's so-called Medicare for All would really be Medicare for None. Under the Democrats' plan, today's Medicare would be forced to die. The Democrats' plan also would mean the end of choice for seniors over their own health care decisions. Instead, Democrats would give total power and control over seniors' health care decisions to the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
Delaying reform will make it worse. Half of America skimps to pay for health care. The only fix is to cut waste.
It has never made sense to me that our health care system is primarily designed to make huge profits for multibillion-dollar insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals, and medical equipment suppliers. Health care is not a commodity. It is a human right. The goal of a sane health care system should be to keep people well, not to make stock holders rich.
Our current system is the most expensive, bureaucratic, wasteful, and ineffective in the world. While the health care industry makes hundreds of billions a year in profit, tens of millions of Americans have totally inadequate coverage, and many of our people suffer and die unnecessarily.
Donald Trump: ObamaCare will never work. It's too expensive, and not only expensive for the person that has it, unbelievably expensive for our country. We have to repeal it. We have to get rid of the lines around the state, where we stop insurance companies from competing. We want competition. She wants to go to a single-payer plan, which would be a disaster.
Jill Stein: We need a Medicare-for-all system. 25 percent of healthcare costs are spent on wasteful paper pushing, on CEO salaries, on advertising, on exorbitant pharmaceutical costs like paying $400 for an EpiPen, which contains $1 worth of medication. Under an improved Medicare, that 25 percent overhead is reduced to 1 percent. It enables us to put our healthcare dollars truly into healthcare, so that you are covered, head to toe, cradle to grave.
TRUMP: Well, I like the mandate. I don't want people dying on the streets. The Republican people, they don't want people dying on the streets, but sometimes they'll say "Donald Trump wants single payer."
Q: Will people with pre-existing conditions be able to get insurance?
TRUMP: Yes. Now, the new plan is good. It's going to be inexpensive. It's going to be much better for the people at the bottom, people that don't have any money. We're going to take care of them through maybe concepts of Medicare. Now, some people would say, "that's not a very Republican thing to say." That's not single payer, by the way. That's called heart. We gotta take care of people that can't take care of themselves.
SANDERS: There is one major country that does not guarantee health care to all people. There is one major country--the United States--which ends up spending almost three times per capita what they do in the U.K. guaranteeing health care to all people, 50 percent more than they do in France guaranteeing health care to all people, far more than our Canadian neighbors, who guarantee health care to all people.
SANDERS: But that is an unfair criticism for the following reason. If you are paying now $10,000 a year to a private health insurance company and I say to you, hypothetically, you're going to pay $5,000 more in taxes, but you're not going to pay any more private health insurance, are you going to be complaining about the fact that I've saved you $5,000 in your total bills? So it's demagogic to say "oh, you're paying more in taxes." We are going to eliminate private health insurance premiums and payments not only for individuals, but for businesses, as well. We are the only country on Earth that allows private insurance companies to rip us off. We spend three times more than the British. We can do better than we're doing right now.
Q: But just to be clear, you are going to raise taxes to do this?
SANDERS: Yes, we will raise taxes, yes, we will.
Clinton argues we can simply expand the Affordable Care Act to achieve universal coverage, which we view as impossible. Sanders is on target with his new Medicare-for-all proposal. However, by preserving the illusion that the ACA is a "step in the right direction," Sanders misses the point that the current U.S. health care system under the ACA is unique among industrialized nations because it treats health care as a commodity rather than a public good.
TRUMP: [I'm] liberal on health care, we have to take care of people that are sick.
Q: Universal health coverage?
TRUMP: I like universal, we have to take care, there's nothing else. What's the country all about if we're not going to take care of our sick?
TRUMP: A complete disaster, yes.
Q: Saying it needs to be repealed & replaced.
TRUMP: Correct.
Q: Now, 15 years ago, you called yourself a liberal on health care. You were for a single-payer system, a Canadian-style system. Why were you for that then and why aren't you for it now?
TRUMP: As far as single payer, it works in Canada. It could have worked in a different age. What I'd like to see is a private system without the artificial lines around every state. I have a big company with thousands of employees. And if I'm negotiating in BY or NJ or CA, I have like one bidder. Nobody can bid. You know why? Because the insurance companies are making a fortune because they have control of the politicians. They're making a fortune. Get rid of the artificial lines and you will have yourself great plans. And then we have to take care of the people that can't take care of themselves. And I will do that through a different system.
Health Care as a Right: Establish an improved "Medicare For All" single-payer public health insurance program to provide everyone with quality health care, at huge savings.
Sanders voted for the Affordable Care Act, but believes that the new health care law did not go far enough. Instead, he espouses a single-payer system in which the federal and state governments would provide health care to all Americans. Participating states would be required to set up their own single-payer system and a national oversight board would establish an overall budget.
SANDERS: The U.S. remains the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all of our people. And yet we are spending almost twice as much per capita. We have a massively dysfunctional health care system. And I do believe in a Medicare-for-all single-payer system, whether a small state like Vermont can lead the nation, which I certainly hope we will, or whether it's California or some other state. At the end of the day, we need a cost-effective, high-quality health care system, guaranteeing health care to all of our people as a right.
The health insurance lobby and other opponents of single-payer care make it sound scary. It's not. In fact, a large-scale single-payer system already exists. It's called Medicare. People enrolled in the system give it high marks. More importantly, it has succeeded in providing near-universal coverage to Americans over the age of 65.
Establishing a single-payer system will mean peace of mind for all Americans. The goal of real health care reform must be high-quality, universal coverage in a cost-effective way. We must ensure that the money we put into health coverage goes to the delivery of health care, not to paper-pushing, astronomical profits and lining CEOs' pockets.
STEIN: We are squandering trillions of dollars over the coming decade on a massive, wasteful health insurance, private health insurance bureaucracy. By moving to a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system, we get a system that people love and want to defend from government tampering, and that system covers everyone comprehensively, puts you back in charge of your healthcare, and, in addition, it actually saves us trillions over the coming decade, equivalent to that austerity plan that they were talking about. What we have right now is 30% of every healthcare dollar is being spent on bureaucracy, red tape and paper pushing. Under Medicare, that 30% shrinks down to 2% to 3%. That's enough to cover everybody. And we deserve that.
A. Small time, sure. There are minor improvements. But on the other hand, he took single-payer off the table. He absolutely took a public option off the table. And how about bringing Wall Street in, the guys who created the problem, among his first appointments. It was pretty clear right then that this was going to be business as usual on steroids. We're certainly more equitable, or more healthy, with what Obama has brought.
A. Small time, sure. There are minor improvements. But on the other hand, he took single-payer off the table. He absolutely took a public option off the table. As we found on issue after issue--the war, reappointing George Bush's secretary of defense, sticking to George Bush's timeline on Iraq, expanding the war, expanding the drone wars all over the place. And how about bringing Wall Street in, the guys who created the problem, among his first appointments. It was pretty clear right then that this was going to be business as usual on steroids. We're certainly not more secure, more equitable, more healthy or safer internationally, with what Obama has brought.
A: Yes, I do.
Q: How would you pay for it?
A: I would pay for it by three ways. 1) I start off dealing with going into a prevention-and-treatment mode here that required us to simplify and modernize the system. That could save $100 billion a year in redundancy that goes on right now. 2) I would immediately provide for catastrophic health insurance for all Americans, and I'd immediately move for insuring every single child in America. That would cost less than what the top 1% tax break costs, $85 billion a year. 3) Then what I would do is I would move to insuring everyone through one of two vehicles. Either a system we work out among the stakeholders, an agreement that everyone essentially gets Medicare from the time you're born or a system whereby everyone can buy into the federal system. Those who don't have the means to buy in, then you subsidize them into the system. I would pay for that by direct revenues.
Our objective [should be] to make reforms for the moment and, longer term, to find an equivalent of the single-payer plan that is affordable, well-administered, and provides freedom of choice. Possible? The good news is, yes. There is already a system in place-the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program-that can act as a guide for all healthcare reform. It operates through a centralized agency that offers considerable range of choice. While this is a government program, it is also very much market-based. It allows 620 private insurance companies to compete for this market. Once a year participants can choose from plans which vary in benefits and costs.
Yet, without enthusiasm, I've decided to support Bill Clinton for president. If Bob Dole were to be elected president, there would be an unparalleled war against working people.
| |||||||||||||