A national health plan—where everyone has access to medicalcare–may be an idea whose time has come. After years of being criticized as a far left idea, a national health plan or Medicare-for-all is favored by the public.
For several years, Kaiser Family Foundation has tracked public opinion on the idea of a national health plan or a single-payer health care plan. Although the wording changed slightly through the years, the question remained approximately the same.
The poll asked voters, “Do you favor or oppose having a national health plan, or (single-payer/Medicare-for-all) plan, in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan? The proportion favoring such an idea was 40 percent in 1998-2000 and only rose to 46 percent in 2008-2009.
However, the favorable percentage rose to 50 percent in 2016 and to 54 percent in 2017, no doubt the result of Bernie Sanders pushing the idea of “Medicare-for-all” in his campaign in 2016 and the public debate over health care as the Republicans tried to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, which had significantly reduced the number of people without health insurance.
Specifically, according to a new Reuters survey over 70 percent of Americans expressed support for Medicare-for-all, a single-payer plan. That includes 85 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans. Only 20 percent of Americans say they outright oppose the idea.
It was always clear to analysts that single-payer plans, while not inexpensive, are less expensive than the current U.S. medical insurance arrangements. For this reason, a few financial leaders who are willing to look without blinders are beginning to see that very fact. For example, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini suggested that the U.S. should at least discuss a single-payer system as a way to bring down costs.
Warren Buffet notes that in 1960 health care was 5 percent of the gross domestic product, but by 2017 it was 17 percent and increasing. He argues that health care costs make companies less competitive as health care takes a bigger and bigger bite out of American companies’ bottom line. While corporate taxes are decreasing, corporate health care costs are increasing.
Buffet’s partner Charlie Munger, a Republican, argued that the corporate burden of health costs is a big disadvantage in competing with manufacturers in other countries, “They have single-payer medicine and our companies foot the bill [certainly a large part of the bill].”
Medical insurance premiums were rising rapidly before the Affordable Care Act occurred, and they have continued to increase with the Affordable Care Act. For Buffett, stopping skyrocketing health care cost increases is job one. He said health care is gobbling up well over $3 trillion a year. That is a scary number, considering the entire federal budget was $3.9 trillion in 2016.
The crowd that favors a single-payer health insurance planincludes a lot of people who are not leftists. Perhaps the country would dowell to listen to one of them–Buffet,the Oracle of Omaha.