How Radical Is Bernie Sanders' 'Medicare For All' Plan? It's To The Left Of Communist China
Sanders, like all of his kindred single-payer advocates, claims that every other industrialized country in the world provides guaranteed universal coverage, and has lower health costs and better health outcomes as a result.
But what Sanders and Co. never, ever, say is that those countries also require their citizens to pay a far bigger share of health care dollars out of pocket than the U.S. does today, or that most of them have some form of private health insurance in the mix.
In Denmark, for example, out-of-pocket spending accounts for 14% of the country's health budget, according to the latest data from the OECD. Australians pay almost 20% of their health costs out of pocket. Brits pay 15% of their health costs directly, as do Canadians. Swiss citizens pay a whopping 28% out of pocket.
Even in Communist China, people pay 32% of the nation's health care costs out of their own pockets, according to the Commonwealth Fund.
On that score, the U.S. system is already more generous than even socialist countries. Just 11% of health costs are paid for out of pocket in the U.S, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
In fact, of all the industrialized nations, there are only two — Luxembourg and France — where people pay a smaller share of their national health bills directly.
And even though the U.S. devotes a far bigger share of its economy to overall health spending, when it comes to out-of-pocket spending, the U.S. share (1.9% of GDP) is lower than 10 other OECD countries and only slightly above the average for all of them.
Nor does any other country rely entirely on government spending, as Sanders and other Democrats propose.
In Canada, for example, 70% of the nation's health costs are government financed, with 15% paid by private insurers, with the rest paid out of pocket, OECD data show. In Switzerland, 64% of health spending is public and 8% is from private insurers. In the U.K., those numbers are 80% and 5%. In China, private insurance picks up almost 6% of the nation's health care costs, with the government paying 62%.
In the U.S., the split is 49% government and 40% private insurance.
What this shows is that the single-payer proposal offered by Sanders is extreme even by the standards of the socialist countries he admires.
Sanders' plan, for example, would cover "the entire continuum of health care," from inpatient care to dental, vision, drugs to rehab. And it would do so without charging patients anything out of pocket. "No more copays, no more deductibles, and no more fighting with insurance companies when they fail to pay for charges," is how he describes it on a web page outlining the plan.
As radical as this is, it's gaining wide support from Democrats. California Sen. Kamala Harris recently announced her support for Sanders' plan. Rep. John Conyers, whose bill makes the same pitch, has more than 100 Democratic co-sponsors.
California's $400 billion single-payer health care bill also promises absolutely "free" health care to everyone in the state, with all costs paid by the state.
As Joshua Holland put it recently in an article for the leftist Nation magazine, "no other health care system offers such expansive benefits."
The fact that leading Democrats are now backing a health plan that has never been tried — outside of, perhaps, Cuba — shows that they are either shamefully ignorant of how other countries finance their health care systems, or they are being purposely deceitful about how radical their plans really are.
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