A single-payer advocate answers the big question: How do we pay for it?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Matt Bruenig has thought a lot about some of the tough policy choices to get to Medicare-for-all.

I recently spoke with Bruenig, who founded the People’s Policy Project and is one of the young left’s leading wonks, about one of the biggest outstanding questions on the debate: how to finance a single-payer health care system. We also talked about his biggest worry for such a system: Can health care supply meet the demand? And finally, we touched on one of the less discussed challenges of a single-payer system: what the government could do for rural hospitals that feel a pinch under single-payer.

If you want to hear a sharp articulation of the left’s counterpoints to some of the most common arguments made against single payer, Bruenig is a voice worth listening to. Our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length.

Dylan Scott

In your opinion, what is the worst critique of Medicare-for-all?

Matt Bruenig

The worst critique, the one that irritates me the most, is the argument about people losing their health care because people lose their health care all the time. They lose their health care every time they switch jobs. There’s a wonderful list of qualifying life events, which allows you to see when people can change their health care mid-year, and it is every catastrophe that occurs in a human life. It’s in many ways a dark document because it acknowledges these are all the times people are losing their health care: when their spouse dies, when they lose their job. The worst moments in your life — oh, also your health care is gone.

That happens all the time. Even if you stay in the same job, your employer might switch your health care at the end of the year. In fact, they’re supposed to be shopping around.

I recognize there is a communications issue in making people understand that. But it is objectively a bad argument to say, because people don’t like losing health care, we should maintain a system in which people lose their health care all the time.


-more-

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/insurance/a-single-payer-advocate-answers-the-big-question-how-do-we-pay-for-it/ar-BBUmFHd?li=BBnb7Kz

[area51]

1. Info about

Rep. Jayapal's house bill. Please contact Nancy Pelosi to ask her to support it.

[stopbush]

2. His ideas about changing the payroll deductions make a lot of sense,

and would put $ in the pockets of low-income workers.

[Horizens]

3. Good Article

I read it and bookmarked it. Really, if anyone wants to advocate for what I like to call "Medicare Expansion" they should read this.