Matt Bruenig writes for Jacobin about the latest Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate of the cost of Medicare for All. The CBO finds that, with Medicare for all, everyone in the country would be guaranteed health insurance at little or no cost and overall health care spending would fall. Medicare for all saves money!
In arriving at its estimated cost, the CBO looked at the number of additional people who would need to be insured, administrative savings from having one system for enrolling everyone and paying providers, along with savings from negotiated rates to providers and pharmaceutical companies. The CBO considered four different options for designing Medicare for all and found savings from all of them ranging from $42 billion to $743 billion in one year. The only design that cost more paid doctors, hospitals and drug companies higher rates and included coverage for long-term services and supports–home care and nursing home care. That design was projected to cost $290 billion a year more.
The design closest to the Medicare for all legislation in the House and Senate–which pays lower rates to providers–is projected to save $650 billion in one year. Even with coverage for long-term services and supports, it saves about $300 billion annually.The CBO finds tremendous administrative savings from moving to Medicare for all.
The CBO determines that administrative costs would be lower than traditional Medicare’s, which are 2 percent, because the federal government would not have to spend money establishing whether people were eligible for coverage. It would also save money on the cost of collecting premiums, which it would not need to do. Consequently, administrative costs would fall to 1.5-1.8 percent, which literally translates to hundreds of billions of dollars in savings.
In sum, the CBO concludes what myriad other single payer/Medicare for All studies conclude. If the US moved to Medicare for all, everyone would be insured and it would cost less than we spend today on healthcare. The issue is not the cost but the political challenges.
Here’s more from Just Care:
Leave a Reply