By Chris Woodward
Even though universal health care may not happen anytime soon, this is not stopping Democrats and their ‘Medicare for All’ campaign.
For many Democrats backing a government-run health-care-for-all plan, it is all about shifting the health care debate.
In fact, Bloomberg says that by making single-payer health care the progressive position, advocates argue that this gives Democrats representing conservative areas of the country political cover to support more modest proposals to expand the government's role in health insurance.
"Everybody understands we're not going to get Medicare for All enacted in January,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told Bloomberg. “But it's a marker about where we want to land, which is to say we want everybody to have health care."
Merrill Matthews – Ph.D. of the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) – says that the system will have problems.
"Under a single payer system, the federal government collects taxes and then pays the medical bills," Matthews explained. "That's how it works in Medicare, as well as Medicaid. Those are the federal programs for seniors and for low-income people [where] the government sets the prices on what it pays, and it in some ways sort of rations care – especially for Medicaid."
Meanwhile, the medical expert contends that Democrats are calling it “Medicare for All” for PR purposes.
"They use the term, ‘Medicare for All’ more as a PR factor because some of their bills are not really like Medicare, but because they know seniors like Medicare, they use that as a selling point to try to say, 'What we're going to do in creating a government-run health care system will be similar to Medicare,'" Matthews pointed out.