Rice University's premier undergraduate journal of scholarship in domestic and international policy.
William Wang
Dec 6, 2022
Medicare-For-All Now, Not Later
Now, more than ever, a major concern of the general American public is their ability to access affordable, high-quality healthcare (Halpert 2022). In most states, healthcare costs are growing faster than the median income; with the presence of stagnant wages, the price of premiums and deductibles are rising at a staggering cost (The Commonwealth Fund 2019). According to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, as much as 80% of the general public worry about how they will access affordable healthcare (Halpert 2022).
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing difficulties in affording sufficient healthcare. The pandemic has decimated supply chains, contributed towards record inflation, and led to unprecedented rates of unemployment. As much as 58% of Americans obtained their health coverage through employer-provided insurance in 2018 (Rae et al. 2020). Due to this dependence on employer-provided health insurance, the pandemic resulted in a drastic increase in the number of people who are uninsured. Specifically, nearly 27 million lost their employer-sponsored health insurance in 2020 due to job losses as a result of the pandemic (O’Reilly 2020). In total, 43.8 million Americans are currently underinsured, and a total of 87 million Americans have inadequate health insurance (Gaffney 2020). It remains paramount for political change to occur in order to ensure that Americans have proper access to healthcare that includes the ability to obtain health services that prevent, diagnose, and treat illnesses affordably and conveniently. A study conducted by the Harvard Medical School found that 45,000 annual deaths are associated with a lack of health insurance (Cecere 2009). As such, it is imperative for Medicare-For-All to become policy in the immediate status quo,
The passage and implementation of Medicare-For-All would decrease healthcare costs, improve healthcare access, increase preventative care usage, reverse job lock, and address racial inequities within the US healthcare system. With these measures,the American healthcare system could save over 100,000 lives a year (Beaton 2017).
The Medicare-For-All Act of 2019 would provide the U.S. government with the right to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies in regard to price-setting of medications (Daughtrey and Naik 2019). This expansion of Medicare would eliminate the most common financial barriers: insurance premiums, copays, and deductibles (Pathak 2019). Eliminating existing financial barriers would yield lower average healthcare costs, thereby allowing more Americans to afford necessary healthcare. Such cost-saving would permit significant benefits as fewer people tend to utilize the healthcare system due to the extreme costs. Increases in cost efficiency in the national healthcare system would result in a 13% saving in national healthcare expenditure according to Galvani et al. (2020).
Additionally, preventative care such as screenings, vaccines, tests, and more services are covered under Medicare (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services 2021). Under the Affordable Care Act, the expansion of Medicare has historically increased access to preventative care; in 2014 to 2016, there was a 60% improvement in the use of preventative care and a 150% increase in productivity (Simon, Soni, and Cawley 2015). Preventative care services provide significant health benefits such as disease screening, counseling, and immunization. It would help avert 9 of the top 10 leading causes of death, including heart disease and diabetes (Fox and Shaw 2015). If everyone were to receive the recommended care without worry for financial cost, the American healthcare system could avert 70% of chronic illness-related deaths (Beaton 2017).
Implementing Medicare-For-All also includes economic benefits, as 11 million Americans are currently caught in a job lock, the inability for an employee to freely leave their employment due to fears of losing benefits. At the risk of losing health benefits, many people do not pursue better job opportunities, thereby reducing turnover rates by 25% (Baker 2015). Medicare-For-All would create fundamental healthcare reforms that would raise workers’ wages, create new job opportunities, and increase socioeconomic mobility within the economy (Bivens 2020). With the enactment of Medicare-for-All, employers would be encouraged to redirect funding toward higher wages and maintain safe working environments. Without the hindrance of seeking suitable health care insurance when searching for new employment, small businesses would no longer face a major disadvantage in providing health insuranced compared to larger firms. These structural economic improvements would yield significant improvements to the well-being and economic security of impoverished groups. According to a study conducted by the People’s Policy Project, Medicare-For-All would reduce headcount poverty by 19 percent and reduce the overall poverty gap by 22 percent (Ryan 2019). By eliminating out-of-pocket medical expenses, the general poor’s income would increase by 29 percent and greatly improve labor mobility (Ryan 2019).
Finally, Medicare-For-All would help to address the fundamental racial inequalities within the U.S. healthcare system. In the United States, racial minorities overwhelmingly bear the brunt of underinsurance; the uninsurance rate for non-Hispanic whites was 5.4 percent compared to 9.7 percent for blacks and 17.8 percent for Hispanics in 2018 (Landers, Vladeck, and Cole 2020). Equitable healthcare coverage remains a distant reality when, on average, Black households own one-tenth of the wealth of their white counterparts (McIntosh et al. 2020). Medical expenses continue to become a large driver behind bankruptcies, contributing to two-thirds of all U.S. bankruptcies totalling 530,000 families each year (Physicians for a National Health Program 2019). Through the elimination of insurance premiums, copays, deductibles, and exorbitant out-of-pocket medical expenses, Medicare-For-All would remove a major component of existing structural barriers that prohibit the advancement of minorities in the U.S.
References
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Beaton, Thomas. “How Preventative Healthcare Services Reduce Spending for Prayers.” Healthpayer Intelligence, 29 Aug. 2017, https://healthpayerintelligence.com/news/how-preventive-healthcare-services-reduce-spending-for-payers.
Bivens, Josh. “Fundamental health reform like ‘Medicare for All’ would help the labor market.” The Economic Policy Institute, 5 Mar. 2020, https://www.epi.org/publication/medicare-for-all-would-help-the-labor-market/.
Cecere, David. “New study finds 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage.” The Harvard Gazette, 17 Sep. 2009, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-finds-45000-deaths-annually-linked-to-lack-of-health-coverage/.
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