What Would a Serious "Medicare for All" Pitch Sound Like?
It wouldn't sound anything like what we're hearing now
Calls for “Medicare for All” are often vapid. A phrase alone isn’t policy; it’s words that signal membership in a group, like when people say “have a blessed day” (Christians) or “the book was so much better than the movie” (assholes). And things get less serious still when people suggest that we could pay for Medicare for All with a wealth tax or by ending aid to Israel, which is like imagining that you could buy a Ferrari by selling framed needlepoints of your witticisms.
That being said, single-payer health insurance is not a crazy idea. Many countries have some version of single-payer, so much so that the “OMG LITERALLY EVERY ADVANCED COUNTRY DOES THIS!!!!” pleas from online lunatics are about 60 percent true. In a sane world, we’d be having a serious discussion about the pros and cons of changing systems. Of course, in our world, we’re having an unserious shouting match over a slogan that could mean 100 different things and that is about as likely to happen in the near term as Snuggle Bear being voted Sexiest Man Alive.
But what would a serious sales pitch sound like? I’ll volunteer to make that pitch because, though I know that single payer is not the only method of achieving universal coverage, I’m friendly to the concept.1 And I’m one of few people incentivised to lay the pros and cons bare, because I’m professional Blog Curmudgeon, not a politician. So, if I was compelled to make a serious pitch for Medicare for All in the US, this would be that pitch:
