US Workers Are Paying High Taxes. But Without Any of the Benefits
&gt; As the Mercatus Center noted last year, by implementing a Medicare for All system, the US could insure 30 million more people, provide dental, vision, and hearing coverage to everyone, and virtually eliminate out-of-pocket expenses, all while saving $2 trillion over the first decade of implementation.<p>This is assuming Medicare would have the same cost structure if it insured everyone that it does right now, which is incorrect because Medicare is currently being subsidized by private insurance.<p>In order to make healthcare in the US cost less, something that is currently being paid for has got to go away. That isn&#x27;t primarily &quot;insurance company profits&quot; or anything like that. The profits are a single digit percentage of the premiums.<p>The costs come from things like the extraordinarily high cost of getting FDA approvals reducing competition between pharma companies, doctors choosing unnecessary tests for liability reasons and patients preferring them when someone else is paying for them and things of that nature. It is not clear how Medicare would change any of that, given that it currently doesn&#x27;t solve them even for existing Medicare patients, it just pays below its share of the fixed costs and lets private insurance pick up the difference.<p>You have to actually get the costs down. In theory you could just declare by fiat that you aren&#x27;t going to pay as much, which would cause <i>something</i> to be cut, but not the inefficiencies that the law continues to require. A &quot;solution&quot; that causes good things to be cut so that existing wasteful things will still fit into the budget is not very good.