The vision of universal access to health care that lies behind Medicare for All has wide appeal. However, as David Brooks noted in a recent column for the New York Times, the problem is less the vision than the transition. Medicare for All, in both its Senate (Sanders) and House (Jayapal) versions seems designed without a thought to the problem of transition. If we can’t get there from here, what is the use of a glittering vision of health care reform?
Fortunately, Medicare for All is not the only path to affordable access to health care for all Americans. Our team at the Niskanen Center has been working on an alternative health care reform known as universal catastrophic coverage (UCC). UCC would cover the needs of the very poor and the very sick in full, as does Medicare for All. At the same time, it would also require those who can afford to do so to pay a fair share of their routine medical expenses through income-based deductibles, coinsurance, and copays. That gives UCC a greater flexibility that would ease many of the transition problems that Brooks lists.
Sticker Shock
The sheer cost of Medicare for All is one of the biggest obstacles to its adoption. As measured by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Public support for comprehensive national health care drops from 56 percent to 37 percent when people are…
