Single payer plan

Heath care cost is $3.2 trillion and 646 billion of this goes to Medicare. This means the average cost for everyone is about $10,000 per person while Medicare cost per person is about $12,000. Since these are elderly people the cost should be higher but it is pushed down by various accounting tricks. Medicare’s strength is its low administrative cost but its weakness is rationing which is does in many ways. A Medicare for all system will have lower cost because of lower administrative cost and rationing. The radical revamping of Medicare will slash costs borne by the government, insurance firms and hospital chains by denying Medicare patients what is presently considered to be normal access to medical procedures, drugs and hospital care. The realignment of Medicare more directly with the profit dictates of the market will become the model for the American health care system as a whole. Since the emphasis is all on cost and not on patient care the single payer system called Medicare for all will likely be how everything ends up. This is what Obama wanted from the beginning. Here is a quote from Obama in 2003: “I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program…I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody