Worth pointing out that Medicare for America is a dumb idea
Who are these people that love their employer plans?
The whole idea seems to be that they don’t want to take away peoples employer plans... but employer plans are shit. Almost across the board, standard Medicare is about 10x better than what 90% of Americans have. It has a $1000 deductible and no copay past that. And the Medicare negotiated rates you pay for a service are like 1/4 of what most private insurers have negotiated.
Worth pointing out that while people's feelings are mixed on their employer healthcare they start to really shift their thoughts on single-payer when you talk about getting rid of it). And that is before we get the death panel treatment during round 2.
And it's anything but a dumb idea IMO. Frankly, it is the sort of technocratic idea that Bernie's was/is probably going to end up as when all is said and done. It achieves UHC in the short run by vastly expanding and consolidating Medicare and likely bleeds out most of the private market except as a smaller supplemental market over the long run with much less up front disruption in it's transition. Considering any reform is going to have to once again go through the Joe Manchin's and Jon tester's of the world on top of all the billion dollar interest groups that will fight tooth and nail from all directions at a single payer proposal of Bernie's stripe. Frankly unlike in the past the Center for American Progress put out a much improved vision than what got us the ACA and we all have Bernie to thank for pulling the center to where it needs to be. The question has and will always be though if lawmakers don't make the same stupid mistakes in their tradeoffs and assumptions like they did with the ACA. Which turned the chance to have UHC into the mixed bag we have now.
Personally I just hope the left(most of which couldn't even tell me the difference between Switzerland, Australia, or Canada but love their systems but get mad if technocrats actually build inspiration from them) don't cling to this weird purity test around this narrow idealistic path of single-payer UHC that literally no country has and end up fucking this up for the near dozenth time in the last 100 years.
The other thing with the Medicare For America plan, as presented, is the medical pla they are offering is also much worse than traditional Medicare. It has much higher deductibles and out of pocket max, that are probably better than your employer plan... but not that much better.
If you think about it, that also doesn’t make a ton of sense, because young people on the expanded Medicare will cost an order of magnitude less to insure than old people and disabled people
As far as bargaining power. Medicare doesn’t bargain, they dictate rates by law. So adding more people to the cool probably wouldn’t change them much. It might change how many providers accept Medicare, but most providers already do.
