"Medicare for All" would work more like Medicaid. Kevin Pham writes:
Medicare for All would cost over $30 trillion in the next 10 years in ideal conditions, but still require physicians and providers to take a pay cut of up to 40% and continue working with the same productivity.
The problem is that physicians already are heavily burdened with their workload. In the 2018 Physicians Foundation survey, up to 80% of physicians reported working at their maximum capacity or beyond.
In the same survey, about 15% of physicians reported limiting the number of Medicaid patients they see and an additional 16% did not see Medicaid patients at all.
Of these physicians who do not see Medicaid patients, or limit the number they see, over a third are in primary care, exactly the kind of physicians we need in greater numbers.
It is not that doctors or greedy, but a combination of administrative burdens, delays in processing claims, and low reimbursement rates made it difficult to justify seeing many Medicaid patients.
As Medicaid and Medicare both drastically underpay relative to private health insurance, hospitals and providers have to charge private insurance more to make up the difference.
[Kevin Pham, “‘Medicare for All’ Actually Isn’t Medicare at All,” The Daily Signal, October 28]
