Democrat Jim McGovern: If You Like Your Health Care, You Can Keep It Under Medicare for All

Echoing former President Barack Obama’s infamous claim about Obamacare, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) claimed Tuesday that Americans will not lose their health care, doctors, or hospitals under Medicare for All.

Rep. McGovern, the chairman of the House Rules Committee, ran a hearing Tuesday on Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Debbie Dingell’s (D-MI) Medicare for All legislation. During the hearing, Chairman McGovern claimed that Americans will not lose their health care.

“People aren’t going to lose their health care with Medicare for All; you would actually get to keep your doctors and go to the hospitals you currently have, the only difference is that you wouldn’t deal with insurance companies,” McGovern said.

McGovern’s claim remains particularly notable because Jayapal and Dingell’s legislation would transform America’s current healthcare system into a single-payer, government-run healthcare system.

Jayapal said in February that her legislation would explicitly eliminate Americans’ private health insurance and create a government-run healthcare system.

We mean a complete transformation of our health care system and we mean a system where there are no private insurance companies that provide these core benefits,” Jayapal said in February. “We mean universal care, everybody in, nobody out.”

Further, McGovern’s comment sounds reminiscent of Obama’s infamous claim that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” which was deemed by PolitiFact to be the “lie of the year” in 2013. Obama claimed roughly 37 times that if Americans liked their healthcare plan they could keep it,  which Obama later admitted wasn’t entirely the case.

“There is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate,” Obama said.

Now, progressive Democrats pushing Medicare for All claim that the same disruption that came with Obamacare will not happen with Medicare for All.

At the same hearing, Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, said at the hearing:

Everybody would lose the current health coverage they have. One-hundred and seventy-three million Americans have job-based health insurance, but those on ACA [Affordable Care Act] coverage, people on Medicare, people on Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program [CHIP], all would be fold into the Medicare for All” system.

Further, at the same hearing, Mercatus Center scholar Charles Blahous said that Medicare for All would cost $60.7 trillion over the next ten years, $38 trillion of which would include new federal spending.

Blahous added that “doubling individual and corporate income taxes would be insufficient to finance even the lower bound” of the $32.6 trillion estimate in new federal spending.