Kamala Harris's Medicare for All just might be a politically viable framework for dramatically improving the American health-care system. EricLevitz writes
For the pragmatists? Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP/Shutterstock Kamala Harris doesn’t want to “restructure society,” she just wants to “take care of the issues that wake people up” at night. She prefers “narrow, tactile proposals” to “grandly ambitious ones” –— because she wants to pass “relevant policy” not pen a “beautiful sonnet.
In her campaign’s own telling, Harris crafted her version of Medicare for All with an eye toward mollifying the electorate’s most prevalent anxieties about single-payer. Many voters who already have employer-provided insurance have a strong sense of loss aversion, which leads them to bristle at talk of rapid change, or the abolition of private insurance options. Others are wary of the middle-class tax increases that Bernie Sanders would enact to replace private insurance premiums.
Politically, however, Harris’s plan enables her to say that she has no intention of abolishing private insurance, or imminently forcing all Americans onto an unproven government plan. Given that “Medicare for All Who Want It ” polls better than single-payer, this seems like a politically sound gambit .
In the first paragraph, Harris refers to the total, aggregate cost of private and public health care in the U.S. In the second, she suggests that a ten-year phase-in will bring down “the overall cost” of Medicare for All, implying that her approach is more cost-efficient than Sanders’s.
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