The California Nurses’ Association breathlessly announced–and I quote from its website–“First-of-Its Kind Study: Medicare for All (Single-Payer) Reform Would Be Major Stimulus for Economy with 2.6 Million New Jobs, $317 Billion in Business Revenue, $100 Billion in Wages.”
Forget Geithner for Treasury Secretary. We need some of these California nurses–they just solved the economic crisis! Except, y’know, for a few details. Despite the hype of “new jobs” and higher wages, there’s still a price tag. A really, really, really high one (at least $120 billion). A really, really, really high one paid for by–wait for it…wait for it…wait for it…–the taxpayers. So to fund this mega-solution to our economic woes, Congress can either increase the (cough, $1 trillion) deficit or raise taxes during the economic downturn the nurses worry about so much.
Hmm. Does that help?
But hey, even if numbers (and snarky rhetorical questions) don’t do it for you, just think about the quality of health care we’ll be treated to with “Medicare for All.” Remember that Medicare:
- dictates and rations care, a process which Tom Daschle (incoming HHS Secretary) would like to formalize with a “Federal Health Board with the power to determine what treatments and procedures are ‘cost-effective’“;
- “effectively prohibits Medicare beneficiaries from going outside the program to obtain higher quality care or maintain medical privacy“; and
- from its 1965 creation to October 2008, financially rewarded physicians whose patients required additional treatment due to physician mistakes.
If you’d like more information–especially on what we should do instead–start here or, for the blog fans, even here. But if after all this, “Medicare for All” seems a great scheme, let me know. I’ve got this highway to Hawaii I’ve been trying to sell…
