Editors at National Review Online offer Republicans an electoral strategy tied to healthcare.
Democrats are partying like it’s 2019.
Coming off a successful midterm election year and convinced that socialism was where the energy of the party would be, Democratic presidential candidates lined up that year to embrace a government takeover of the health-care system they branded as “Medicare for All.” But in relatively short order, questions about the staggering cost and massive disruptions associated with the idea helped sink the candidacies of Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, and ultimately helped catapult Joe Biden (who endorsed more incremental expansion of government-subsidized health insurance) over Bernie Sanders.
This year, Medicare for All has reemerged. Democrats have nominated a number of candidates who support the idea, including in two of the most competitive Senate races — Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Troy Jackson in Maine.
The pitch for Medicare for All starts off quite simply. We’re the richest country in the world, we spend all sorts of money on weapons, we should be able to afford to provide free health care to everybody. The promise is of a paradise in which there is no more dealing with being denied care by insurance companies or struggling to pay for prescription drugs.
Yet once anybody examines the details, the sales pitch becomes much less appealing. To start, there is the incredible cost. Back in 2019, the progressive Urban Institute estimated that a Medicare for All system along the lines of what Sanders proposed would cost about $34 trillion over ten years. To be clear, that was not the total cost of the program, but how much it would be expected to increase federal spending on top of the trillions a year we already spend on health-care programs. After seven years of inflation, the number is certainly higher today. An updated analysis from Stephen Parente of the right-leaning American Action Forum estimated that the cost of such a system over the next decade would be $47.4 trillion.
