What about Medicare-for-All?

In the early days of the Obamacare negotiations, there were proposals to make Medicare accessible to anyone who wanted to enroll, without regard to age and with premiums based on income up to full market rates. Some variations would have restricted Medicare-for-All to people who couldn't qualify for employer-based coverage. Doing something like this would have expanded a long-established, generally well-run and well-respected program, and might even have strengthened it by collecting premiums from younger, healthier enrollees. Everybody who isn't in Medicare themselves knows people who are. By contrast, Obamacare creates a complex new bureaucracy that is making people confused and scared. Expanding an existing program would have had to be more efficient than starting something new from scratch.



Ideally, I think we should have universal single-payer health care. Failing that, Obamacare is much better than nothing. But I never understood why Medicare-for-All never got any traction. What were the flaws in those proposals?

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