Despite overwhelming evidence that single-payer healthcare systems bankrupt government budgets, drive up costs, and reduce access to care resulting in long waiting lists, a new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation study found an alarming majority of Americans — 51 percent overall and 74 percent of Democrats — now support such an approach.
Perhaps this is not surprising considering the growing mainstream acceptance of “Medicare for All” plans mainstream Democrats have been pushing across the country. This push started in earnest with Sen. Bernie Sanders, who I call the “Pied Piper of single-payer healthcare.” Sanders outlined a national Medicare for All plan when he was seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. What he did not provide was an estimate of the cost of his plan or how it would be paid for. However, the Urban Institute projected the cost at $32 trillion over 10 years. It formed the basis of his 2017 Senate Medicare for All bill, which 15 senators have endorsed.
I write in my new book, The False Promise of Single-Payer Health Care, that everywhere it’s been tried, single-payer results in long waits, rationed care, and lack of access to the latest technology and innovation. Still, my own California, Rhode Island, Washington state, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts have begun the crusade for the same disastrous approach that will result in the same disastrous results.
In the lead up to Obamacare, progressives argued a government-run program would increase health coverage, drive down costs, and improve care — but as free-marketers predicted, it failed on all counts. Now Americans, faced with high premiums and fewer coverage options, are searching for answers, and too many Democrats are holding up a single-payer system as the solution.
But here’s the truth: I came to the United States in 1991, in part, to escape the single-payer system called Medicare, in my native Canada. A recent OECD study of nine developed nations showed that Canada was the only country that outright banned any private coverage for procedures deemed medically necessary.
In 1993, Canada’s average wait time from seeing a primary care doctor to getting treatment by a specialist was more than two months. In 2017, wait times skyrocketed to an average of more than 21 weeks.
It seems everywhere I go, however, the debate and siren call for single-payer follows. Interestingly, in California the debate over single-payer healthcare recently reached a fortunate impasse, when Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said following a series of more than 30 hours of hearings that Senate Bill 562 would not go forward in the legislature. Several Assembly Democrats raised concerns about the burden such a system would have on state budgets and how such a plan with no copays, no deductibles, and no referrals to specialists would be paid for. The Senate Appropriations Committee estimated the Healthy California Act that passed the Senate in June a year ago would cost $400 billion a year, more than double the entire state budget.
It was noteworthy that Peter Shumlin, the former Democratic Governor of Vermont, withdrew his plan for single-payer in 2014 due to the economic burden it would place on taxpayers and the state.
Activists, including members of the Nurses Union, the Service Employees International Union, and other progressives will continue to push for a complete government takeover of our healthcare system — “single-payer is just not going away as an issue for Democrats,” according to Democratic strategist Garry South — and recent poll numbers suggest they’re having an impact. But in the end, Medicare for All simply isn’t the answer to achieving affordable, accessible, high-quality healthcare for all. Instead, market reforms that give patients greater ownership and decision-making over their healthcare dollars will be the real secret to our long-term health care success.
Sally Pipes (@sallypipes) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is president, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book The False Promise of Single-Payer Health Care (Encounter) was published this spring.
