Fresh off winning Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Dr. El-Sayed rightly pointed out to Kristen Welker that big insurers, big hospital-centric health-care organizations, and big pharmaceutical companies have racked up big profits for them and big bills for the American patient. But thinking Big Government is going to make American health-care costs any smaller is a misdiagnosis of what ails the largest expenditure of our GDP. His panacea for a health-care system in the palliative stages of its institutional life is simply to offer a Medicare for All program so complete in its coverage that the government could “guarantee cradle to grave health care from the moment that somebody is born to the moment that they expire . . . at 120 years of life after a long, healthy life in their sleep peacefully.” It sounds like Sayed-side Economics isn’t “Medicare for All.” He’s writing a prescription for: “Miracle for All.” It’s a tough pill to swallow.
Welker asked Dr. El-Sayed whether making health care free and universal would require raising taxes. He bullishly replied that he’d simply tax the billionaires. She pressed further — what about people who make less than a million dollars? But before Welker could find the lowest rung needed to be pushed off the economic ladder to cushion the weight of a Medicare for All program, Dr. El-Sayed pivoted. “Imagine,” he said, “if instead of paying your premium to your health insurance company [contracted by your employer] . . . instead you paid a little bit more in taxes.” Welker asked him to confirm, plainly, that people earning under a million dollars could see taxes rise. A progressive shouldn’t be afraid to admit that the 1 percent will see their taxes rise, but taxes are bitter medicine for voters, El-Sayed would only answer: “We’d be paying for health care in a different way.” That is Obamacare’s old promise wearing new scrubs — if you like your premium, you can keep it, only now it’s collected by the IRS, and it could go up. And you have no one else to appeal to.
The arithmetic doesn’t cooperate with progressive sleight of hand. The average American family already pays $6,850 a year in premiums toward employer coverage that costs nearly $27,000 in total including the employer’s share. This money would have to be replaced, not merely reposted. Independent estimates from both the Urban Institute and the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center estimate roughly $32 trillion in new federal spending over such a plan’s first decade. Billionaires’ wealth, taxed at any politically survivable rate, does not begin to close that gap. The American public know this. KFF polling finds roughly six in ten Americans favor Medicare for All in the abstract, but that support collapses toward an even split the moment the tradeoff is framed honestly as higher taxes for lower out-of-pocket costs.
None of this means the current system deserves defending, but Medicare for all isn’t going to make the pharmaceutical companies or the hospital-centered health-care organizations pay for their part in ruining the doctor and patient’s space for healing. But swapping today’s inefficient private purchaser for an equally unprepared federal one, before the underlying incentives, workforce, and state-by-state cost structures are repaired, isn’t good medicine, it’s socialist snake oil. We would continue to ignore the psychological, environmental, and culture misalignments of our current country that created the ineffective and inefficient system to begin with while the limbo pole of who can pay sinks lower as premiums climb higher. Dr El-Sayed’s prescription for pricier health care isn’t just Medicare for All won’t make health care a right, it’ll only make it a utility. It should sicken us all the more that El-Sayed is wearing his white coat for this medicine show.