“We hear a lot these days about Medicare for All. It has gone from being a fringe idea to being the litmus test for Democratic Presidential contenders, advocated most fiercely by long-time proponents Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren. A majority of Americans now support the concept, although what they think it means and how much they are willing to pay for it are less clear.”
“The arguments for Medicare for All are simple: the current system generates too many profits (especially for health insurers and pharma), has too much administrative complexity, and exposes too many people to high cost-sharing and premiums. Medicare for All would take care of all those, proponents assert.”
“So, I wonder — why would people be calling for a new system that would still have thousands of private hospitals/facilities and millions of healthcare professionals, practicing FFS medicine using countless systems and data structures? In short, why aren’t people calling for VA for All? Like Medicare, the VA — more specially, its healthcare component, the Veterans Health Administration — is charged with providing healthcare to a designed population, in this case, veterans. Unlike Medicare, though, it does so as an integrated health system (by far the largest in the U.S.), with 170 VA Medical Centers, over a thousand outpatient facilities, and somewhere over 10,000 physicians.”
“Despite what you might read about problems with wait times (which may, in fact, be overstated) or poor care, studies have found that…” Read the full post here.
Source: Instead of Medicare for All, How about VA for All? – By Kim Bellard, October 11, 2019. Open Health News.
