As we know Bernie Sanders wants to sort out American medical care once and for all by establishing what he calls Medicare For All. Well, OK, I don’t think that’s a good idea and I don’t think it will work as advertised either. But the US has two national and tax funded health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid. That second also appears, on paper at least, to be the better program. It covers more health care services for example, nursing home care, personal care. It’s also significantly cheaper, in that it pays providers less than Medicare does. And Bernie’s insistent that such payments will fall under his plan so as to make the sums add up.
It would also seem to be quite simple to enact. Just make the Medicaid qualifying income 1,000 percent of the Federal poverty line or something like that.
So if it’s a wider program, cheaper, better in fact, why isn’t it Medicaid For All? Why isn’t Senator Sanders expanding the better, cheaper, program?
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If it is legitimate to change thresholds so that every American is poor and thus qualifies for Medicaid, a better solution is to redefine every American as a military veteran so we can all avail ourselves of the Veterans' Administration. They are yet another agency, with a limit on total spending set by Congress, and a mandate to give a target population all the medical care it thinks it wants.
(Again, doctors are refusing to treat Medicare/Medicaid patients, and veterans are subject to absurd run-arounds, to which the bipartisan solution is to let them get care anywhere they want and send the bill to that agency with a limited budget. And anyone who opposes that is soft on national defense!)
Once you extend an agency's domain to virtually the entire population, it is irrelevant whose coverage package is "more complete," because it will quickly run out of other people's money to spend. Its results will be the opposite of its mandate, just as surely as the Department Of No Energy.
If it is legitimate to change thresholds so that every American is poor and thus qualifies for Medicaid, a better solution is to redefine every American as a military veteran so we can all avail ourselves of the Veterans' Administration. They are yet another agency, with a limit on total spending set by Congress, and a mandate to give a target population all the medical care it thinks it wants.
(Again, doctors are refusing to treat Medicare/Medicaid patients, and veterans are subject to absurd run-arounds, to which the bipartisan solution is to let them get care anywhere they want and send the bill to that agency with a limited budget. And anyone who opposes that is soft on national defense!)
Once you extend an agency's domain to virtually the entire population, it is irrelevant whose coverage package is "more complete," because it will quickly run out of other people's money to spend. Its results will be the opposite of its mandate, just as surely as the Department Of No Energy.