Kamala Harris is open to compromise on private insurers' role during 'Medicare for all' push

[MooDrew]

90. Respectfully, your hypothesis is wrong

Not your 50% number, but the idea we could have the other 50% on some sort of Medicare for all program while everyone else stays with their employer plan. It won't work for a lot of reasons.

1. What most people don't realize is that employer plans aren't all that good. If you develop a serious chronic illness or suffer a catastrophic injury while on an employer plan, you will quickly realize that the system is designed to eject you onto Medicaid as quickly as possible to get you off the employer's health care rolls. Most people can't continue to work while suffering a serious illness or catastrophic injury. With no work income, they can't afford the astronomical COBRA premiums.


2. Employer-based insurance is much more expensive than you realize. If you want to verify this for yourself, ask your human resources person what your COBRA premium would be if you left your employment. Wayback in 2003 my wife who was in her late 20s left her job. I was in my mid-30s and was on her plan too. Our COBRA premium was $18xx.xx a month for a policy that had a pretty high out of pocket. Those premiums have only gone up since then.


3. If you don't put those people on employer plans into the pool, the people on the government plan end up being the most expensive to cover as they are generally speaking the sickest. A plan that does this is likely to fail as the costs become overwhelming. You in effect are leaving all the gravy (people least likely to need care) in the system to go into health insurance companies' pockets. As I mentioned, employer-based health insurance is largely illusory for the middle class and low-income folks. Someone that gets really sick or injured is going to end up on Medicaid or eventually Medicare anyway, so why have their employer spend their healthy years paying into private insurance? The gravy would serve a much more worthwhile purpose paying expenses of those who need care.

4. By keeping half the people on employer-based insurance you are cutting off the best source of funds for a universal healthcare system. Take all of those employers that are paying monthly health insurances premiums for their employees and have them pay a payroll tax to fund a universal healthcare system instead. That is what that conservative George Mason Study showed. That if you took everything that was currently being spent on healthcare it would be less expensive to have a zero dollar out pocket universal healthcare. For all of those saying but Medicare isn't free, those numbers solve that problem too.


I am not even going to get into other cost efficiencies that having everyone in the same system would bring such as lower cost prescription drugs that you don't get with a split system as you envision it.