Status Updates From Medicare for All: A Citizen...

Key concept: America treats healthcare as a consumer product. This leads to market failures, high prices, rationed or unavailable access to care, eroding quality of care, and poorer health outcomes.

“Either way, the urgent problem of providing accessible, affordable, dependable, and equitable healthcare to Americans at scale remains. As we hope we've demonstrated, M4A is a viable solution to that problem.”

“However, the public consensus may be shifting again. The Great Recession exposed many Americans to a level of poverty and insecurity that hadn't been seen in America since the Great Depression—which the New Deal was originally created to solve. Rising inequality paralleling the Gilded Age has left a large swath of the country without stable, secure employment or basic access to healthcare.”

“the public conversation about M4A may be about more than just healthcare…Empowered by the idea of promoting "the general welfare," American government as we know it today emerged from a bipartisan consensus around the critical role of government in providing basic public goods that grew out of the Progressive Era in the 1910s and 1920s and took hold during the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s.”

“And the politics are treacherous. Passing M4A would require standing up to deeply entrenched private interests in order to launch a massive reinvestment in government public goods.”

“M4A could cost the American people less overall by eliminating much of the bloated overhead needed to prop up our current system and by cracking down on the industry's ability to charge high prices for care. By trading insurance premiums for taxes and slashing out-of-pocket costs, M4A has the potential to put more money into the pockets of most American families.”