Single Payer: We’ve Been There, Done That And It May Bankrupt Us Yet

By David Catron

Well, our progressive friends are once again calling for single payer health care. The ironic pretext this time is that Obamacare has collapsed into chaos. The health care “reform” law they assured us would cure the ills of our medical delivery system is disintegrating before their eyes. But the advocates of the “Affordable Care Act,” as these people stubbornly refer to it, refuse to accept that the crackup was caused by the inevitable incompetence of government bureaucrats. 

Thus, people like Michael Moore, Paul Krugman, and even Colin Powell urge us to cast out the money changers and wholly surrender our health care to the tender mercies of the federal government. 

If Powell possessed any expertise in health care policy, he would know that the U.S. has spent nearly half a century experimenting with the kind of system he advocates. Paul Krugman puts a name on this experiment in a recent pitch for single payer, “In this hypothetical system you wouldn’t have to shop for insurance, nor would you have to provide lots of personal details… we don’t have to imagine such a system, because it already exists. It’s called Medicare.… So why don’t we just extend that system to cover everyone?”

That’s right. Medicare is a single payer health care system for seniors, and it is Exhibit A in the case against government-run health care. “Medicare-for-All” is what single payer advocates usually mean when they refer to universal health care. Most of these people naïvely believe that such a system could be paid for with a few modest tax increases. Krugman, however, is an economist and knows perfectly well why we don’t “just extend that system to cover everyone.” He knows Medicare-for-All would bankrupt the country.

Indeed, Medicare threatens to break the bank even without the vast expansion that would be required to convert it to a single payer system covering all Americans. The most recent Medicare Trustees report reveals that the program is encumbered by an unfunded liability of $43 trillion. This is the amount by which the program’s promised benefits will exceed the tax revenue available to pay for them. $43 trillion is three times the nation’s GDP. Thus, the Trustees also project that Medicare will become insolvent in 2026.

How, then, can we afford to expand it to cover everyone? We can’t, of course. Yet single payer advocates continue to mislead the public. 

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