Five Things Democrats Did Not Tell You About Medicare for All

Democrats, Democratic Socialists, and progressives continue to advocate for “Medicare for All” government-run health care program; however, there remain several obstacles facing such a utopian program.

Here are five things the left, the media, and the establishment did not tell you about Medicare for All.

$32-$38 TRILLION dollar cost.

Several scholars have pinned the cost of Medicare for All to at least $32 trillion, others have put the cost at $38 trillion. Mercatus Scholar Charles Blahous released a study in August which found that the single-payer healthcare scheme would cost $38 trillion over the next 10 years and would require “historic tax increases to pay for it.”

Blahous noted that doubling the individual and corporate income taxes would not cover the costs of the socialized medicine plan.

Last year, the Urban Institute found that Medicare for All would cost roughly $32 trillion over 10 years. Even the Washington Post admitted last year that the plan would be “astonishingly” expensive.

Kenneth Thorpe, a health policy scholar at Emory University, said that many Americans will pay more in taxes to pay for Medicare for All than they currently do in health insurance premiums.

“Even though people don’t pay premiums, the tax increases are going to be enormous. There are going to be a lot of people who’ll pay more in taxes than they save on premiums,” Thorpe explained.

Ignore Medicare’s insolvency, enact Medicare for All! 

Medicare, the government healthcare program to help older Americans, will go bankrupt in roughly eight years. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), one of the Senate’s foremost healthcare experts, noted that adding half of the country to the program will not improve anyone’s health care.

“My point is Medicare for All is Medicare for none,” Cassidy told Breitbart News in October. “Medicare is actually going bankrupt in eight years, and now Bernie Sanders wants to put 150 million more people into a system going bankrupt in eight years?”

Democrats do not how to pay for it.

Democrats have struggled to explain how they would pay for such an extraordinarily expensive program such as Medicare for All.

In November Democrat National Committee (DNC) chief executive officer Seema Nanda admitted that she does not know how to pay for the socialized medicine scheme.

“I don’t know how we’re going to get there, but these are all big conversations that we need to be engaged in,” Nanda said.

Incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took to Twitter in December to mislead her followers by suggesting that because the Pentagon supposedly lost or misused $21 trillion over several decades, they could somehow make up the money to pay for two-thirds of Medicare for All. The Post fact-checked her claim and gave her four Pinocchios for her misleading claim.

Universal health care and open borders do not mix well. 

As Breitbart News’ Joel Pollak noted in October, “You can’t have universal health care and open borders.”

“The same people who say we should have “Medicare for All” also want to allow as many immigrants into the country as possible — legal or illegal,” Pollak explained. “That would swiftly bankrupt and destroy whatever health care the government managed to provide, leaving Americans with nothing.”

2008 and 2012 Republican presidential candidate and former Congressman Ron Paul has contended that America’s entitlement and welfare system creates a perverse incentive which creates more illegal immigration.

Paul said, “You subsidize illegal immigration, you get more of it.”

To solve the problem, Paul contended that America should make it harder for illegal immigrants to access American welfare. Paul said that to fix illegal immigration there should not be “a penny in welfare for immigrants. It’s really that simple.”

Democrats cannot agree on what the program will look like and it’s part of the strategy.

Adam Green, a co-founder of the leftist Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), said in July that part of Medicare for All’s draw is its “pleasant ambiguity,” meaning that the program could mean many things to many different leftists.

Green told Vox in July:

For anybody who supports Medicare-for-all single payer, what better way to debunk the right wing lies than to allow millions and millions of Americans to voluntarily opt into Medicare and love it? As a political strategy, having Medicare-for-all be a broad umbrella where any candidate can embrace some version of it… that moves the center of gravity in the Democratic party.

Vox echoes this sentiment by noting that Medicare for All is far more popular than “socialized medicine.”

Vox then cites a Kaiser Family Foundation study which found that while over 60 percent of Americans have a positive view of Medicare for All and “Universal health coverage,” single-payer health insurance and socialized medicine have less than a majority of Americans’ favorability.

Vox wrote that “it is undoubtedly true that Medicare-for-all, as a slogan, is more popular — as are some of these more incremental policies, like giving people the option of buying into Medicare.”

“There is a pleasant ambiguity and more of a north star goal nature around Medicare-for-all,” Green contended. “This really does not need to be a huge intra-party battle. Why get in the weeds during the campaign?”