Medicare for All or Medicare for America

I find myself afraid of both of these options. What am I afraid of?

I fully believe that we should all have affordable healthcare. A couple hundred dollars a month seems ok to me. Obamacare delivered this for me in two different states a few years ago. Now my premiums are $500, which seems egregious. I understand that other people had high premiums from the start.

Republicans are already attacking the proposals for Medicare expansions. The attacks remind me of what I’ve always heard from them — government doesn’t work, government is inefficient, government will screw this up, only dumb people trust government. These messages from Republicans in government.

Do I fear that a huge scale expanded medicare system won’t work because it might not work? Or is because Republicans will sabotage it constantly to ensure that even if it does work, it won’t work nearly as well as it should.

This is exactly what they did with the ACA. Democrats, under Obama, our great black hope, adopted the Republican proposal for a market-based solution for healthcare. We started at the compromise, and Republicans gleefully tacked to the right, eroding the ACA in every attempt to break it. Having doomed the functioning of the ACA markets, they blame democrats for high premiums.

The best part so far about having Medicare expansions on the table, whichever version it might turn out to be, is that it has the effect of pulling the Republicans to the center. They might, like the hypocrites they are, end up rebranding Obamacare as Trumpcare.

It makes me think we need to tack even further to the left. What’s way to the left of Medicare for All? I like all the health justice ideas I’ve heard. I think yoga as preventative healthcare should be universal. When I got cancer, it was amazing how easy they made it for me to get radiation and shots, but how impossible it was to get therapy or yoga. Why? Priorities. If there were money in yoga, it would be everywhere. Let’s put money in yoga.

I’ve been listening to a few podcasts about the costs for these healthcare plans. They make it clear that the universal healthcare systems are expensive. Much of the money, we are already collectively spending, but we are spending it in a distributed way, not all with the government. It’s frustrating to me that when we go to war, we just spend, but when we look at the healthcare of our citizens, we can’t afford it.

What would happen if they just started to add segments of the population to medicare? Like lowering the age year by year? Or as the last expansion by state, based on income? Wouldn’t that give us time to absorb more and more people into the system without overloading it or causing a terrible break?