Paul Jay — The MMT Debate With Dean Baker & Randall Wray

Good "debate." Lays important issues on the table. Short read.

TRNN
The MMT Debate With Dean Baker & Randall Wray

PERI — Economic Analysis of Medicare for All

Abstract

This study by PERI researchers Robert Pollin, James Heintz, Peter Arno, Jeannette Wicks-Lim and Michael Ash presents a comprehensive analysis of the prospects for a Medicare for All health care system in the United States. The most fundamental goals of Medicare for All are to significantly improve health care outcomes for everyone living in the United States while also establishing effective cost controls throughout the health care system. These two purposes are both achievable. As of 2017, the U.S. was spending about $3.24 trillion on personal health care—about 17 percent of total U.S. GDP.

Meanwhile, 9 percent of U.S. residents have no insurance and 26 percent are underinsured—they are unable to access needed care because of prohibitively high costs. Other high-income countries spend an average of about 40 percent less per person and produce better health outcomes. Medicare for All could reduce total health care spending in the U.S. by nearly 10 percent, to $2.93 trillion, while creating stable access to good care for all U.S. residents.

PERI — Political Economy Research Institute – UMASS Amherst
Economic Analysis of Medicare for All
Robert Pollin, James Heintz, Peter Arno, Jeannette Wicks-Lim, Michael Ash
November 30, 2018 |
Research Report

See also

Common Dreams
'Easy to Pay for Something That Costs Less': New Study Shows Medicare for All Would Save US $5.1 Trillion Over Ten Years

Jake Johnson

Meagan Day — Medicare for All and Free College Tuition Are Wildly Popular Policies

Seventy percent of Americans said they support a single-payer or Medicare for All health insurance system — including 85 percent of registered Democrats and 52 percent of registered Republicans. Compare these numbers to 2014, when only 21 percent of Americans thought we should have a single-payer system.

The number of Americans who want to eliminate the private insurance industry and replace it with a single universal public program has more than tripled in just four years.…

Similarly, according to the Reuters poll, 79 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Republicans say they support tuition-free college, amounting to 60 percent overall. It’s hard to find earlier polling data on this subject because it wasn’t even a widely discussed political topic prior to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign — despite the fact that college tuition has more than doubled in the last 30 years, and the student debt crisis has consequently spiraled out of control.

Sanders’s campaign put the idea on the map. Hillary Clinton responded to this pressure from her left by drafting a watered-down version of Bernie’s universal proposal. But the cat was out of the bag, despite establishment Democrats’ best efforts to shove it back in. Now a majority of Americans believe that we should have free public education....

Jacobin
Medicare for All and Free College Tuition Are Wildly Popular Policies

Meagan Day

Jeff Epstein — The True, Accurate, And Only Answer To “How *Exactly* Will We Pay For Medicare For All?”

So, how exactly do we “pay for” Medicare for All?

The same way that we just “paid for” $700,000,000,000 for a single year of military funding.

The same way that we just “paid for” $1,500,000,000,000 in tax cuts for the wealthy.

The same way that we “paid for” a $1,300,000,000,000 fighter jet in 2016.

The same way that the United States has always “paid for” all of the fantastically-expensive things that benefit the powerful: Immediately and without discussion. Because they want it.…

Quotes Stephanie Kelton, but selects a quote that doesn't give the actual answer — credit bank accounts as the currency issuer.

Without making the distinction between the currency issuer and currency users, the question cannot be answered properly in terms of what occurs operationally.

Fail. Well, OK. It's step forward, albeit a small one. Let's give it a "D" instead of an "F."

Citzens' Media TV

The True, Accurate, And Only Answer To “How *Exactly* Will We Pay For Medicare For All?”

editorial by Jeff Epstein, Editor-in-Chief of Citizens’ Media TV

ht Yves Smith at Naked Captialism

Russell Mokhiber — Study Finds Single Payer Viable in 2018 Elections

Medicare for All is politically viable in 2018.

That’s according to a new report from Alex Panagiotopoulos and Kingston Creative.

The report is titled – Is Medicare for All Politically Viable? A Guide to 561 Congressional Candidates….

Lookin' good. JG getting play, too. Unfortunately, the Democratic Establishment that doles out funds to candidates is against it.

Counterpunch

Study Finds Single Payer Viable in 2018 Elections
Russell Mokhiber | editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.

Wendell Potter — Even Business Leaders Are Realizing Health Insurance Companies Serve No Purpose

Klepper wrote that this way of doing business has been "spectacularly successful" for the health insurance industry. As he noted, between May 2009 and May 2017, the stock prices of the five largest investor-owned health insurers -- Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, Humana and United -- increased between 387 percent and 748 percent, much more than the Dow Jones average.

The CEOs of those companies have become spectacularly wealthy as shareholder value has skyrocketed. They undoubtedly have to be concerned to hear that a growing number of business leaders are saying it's time to give serious thought to single-payer health care in the United States.

Not long before I left my job in the insurance industry in 2008, a coworker asked our CEO during a company leadership meeting what kept him up at night. He responded with a single word that most of us, I suspect, had to look up. That word was, you guessed it, "disintermediation."

He said he worried that someday a majority of Americans -- and more specifically, a majority of business leaders -- might begin to question the value proposition of insurance companies and reach the conclusion that they are little more than unnecessary middlemen....

Truthout
Even Business Leaders Are Realizing Health Insurance Companies Serve No Purpose
Wendell Potter, formerly vice president of communications for Cigna

Dennis J Bernstein — The Push for a Medicare-for-All Plan

Sen. Bernie Sanders has unveiled a new single-payer healthcare plan which would provide all Americans with government-sponsored health coverage. Sanders’s plan, supported by some 16 Democrats in the Senate, calls for an overhaul of the healthcare system with what would essentially be a tweaked and revitalized version of Medicare-for-all.

“Today we say that a function of a rational healthcare system is to provide quality care to all in a cost-effective way,” declared Sanders, an independent from Vermont, “and not to continue a system which allows insurance companies and drug companies to make hundreds of billions in profits each year and makes healthcare industry CEO’s extremely wealthy.”

Flanked by supporting senators in making his Wednesday announcement, Sanders also noted that a Medicare-for-all program would end “the complexity of a system which adds enormous stress at a time when people need it the least.”...

Consortium News
The Push for a Medicare-for-All Plan
Dennis J Bernstein

Zero Hedge — Even Bernie Sanders Thinks "Medicare For All" Would Bankrupt America

This is an illustration of the political cost of Bernie not understanding and embracing MMT. He should have paid closer attention to MMT economist Stephanie Kelton when she was his economic adviser.

1. A currency sovereign cannot "go bankrupt." A currency issuer can always issue currency to cover its obligations in the currency of issue. In this case, default is a political choice rather than a financial necessity.

2. The only actual constraint on a currency soveriegn is the availability of real resources. This implies a financial constraint if effective demand created exceeds the capacity to supply real resources to meet it. Then accelerating inflation could result.

3. The United States government is a currency soveriegn. Affordability is never an issue.

4. A sovereign currency issuer has a monopoly on the issuance of the currency and can exercise this monopoloy by setting the prices the government will pay, including the interest rate.

Zero Hedge
Even Bernie Sanders Thinks "Medicare For All" Would Bankrupt America

Tyler Durden

Ryan Grim — The Obamacare Fight Is Over — Now It’s On To Universal Medicare

The train is pulling out of the station.

The Intercept
The Obamacare Fight Is Over — Now It’s On To Universal Medicare
Ryan Grim

Also

Bernie’s Army: 24 Organizations With Millions of Members Vow To Help Pass His Universal Medicare Plan
Zaid Jilani

Pharma CEO Worries Americans Will Say “Enough is Enough” and Embrace Bernie Sanders’ Single-Payer Plan
Lee Fang

Democrats Follow Bernie Sanders' Lead on Single-Payer — Aaron Mate interviews Adam Gaffney

 Well, what Clinton said will never, ever happen is now looking more and more possible. A number of prominent Democrats are lining up behind it, Sanders' bill for single-payer. Last week, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris jumped on board. Now, Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York are signing on as well. Bernie Sanders is set to unveil his Medicare for All Bill on Wednesday. Adam Gaffney is an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a member of Physicians for a National Health Program....

TRNN
Democrats Follow Bernie Sanders' Lead on Single-Payer

Aaron Mate interviews Adam Gaffney, Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance,and secretary and  member of the board of directors of the single-payer advocacy organization Physicians for a National Health Program

Zaid Jilani — Trumpcare Is Dead. “Single Payer Is the Only Real Answer,” Says Medicare Architect.

Many health care activists are now pushing to adopt what is called a “single payer” health care system, where one public health insurance program would cover everyone. The U.S. currently has one federal program like that: Medicare. Expanding it polls very well.

One of the activists pushing for such an expansion is Max Fine, someone who is intimately familiar with the program — because he helped create it. Fine is the last surviving member of President Kennedy’s Medicare Task Force, and he was also President Johnson’s designated debunker against the health insurance industry.

Fine, now 91, wrote to The Intercept recently to explain that Medicare was never intended to cover only the elderly population, and that expanding it to everyone was a goal that its architects long campaigned for....

Could the GOP pick up on this?

After the death of the Senate healthcare bill yesterday, The Intercept reached out to Fine for comment about where Congress should go next. “Single payer is the only real answer and some day I believe the Republicans will leap ahead of the Democrats and lead in its enactment,” he speculated, “just as did Bismarck in Germany and David Lloyd George and Churchill in the UK.”

No way the presently configured GOP could ever pass anything like this.

The Intercept
Trumpcare Is Dead. “Single Payer Is the Only Real Answer,” Says Medicare Architect.
Zaid Jilani

Democratic Party Resistance to Medicare for All Traceable to Campaign Funding — Aaron Maté interviews Corbin Trent

No mystery there. Basically, because corruption.

But ultimately, the main power we have is in primary opposition.

So, we're going to be really targeting those districts, and ensuring that we have really solid primary challengers for the 2018 midterms. I think that's where you really start to apply pressure, is replacing people in the House, and the Senate, that aren't doing the people's work...

TRNN
Democratic Party Resistance to Medicare for All Traceable to Campaign Funding

Aaron Maté interviews Corbin Trent

Beowulf — Health is the War of The State

The first step of any political reform, I’ve always believed, is to figure out how to achieve the desired goal with the minimum number of changes to the existing legal structure. [Beowulf if a lawyer.] As I’ve written before, Obama’s healthcare plan should have simply been a universal plan similar to Medicare (if not Medicare itself) that covered every American from the day they were born instead of when they turned 65. It would have been faster, cheaper, more universal (as in 100%) and more popular. It was a mistake Obama didn’t take that route and unlike Bill Clinton, he didn’t have an excuse for it....

Beowulf tells how to get there with Pete Stark's Americare and why the Democrats Medicare for All bill (HR 676) is a non-starter the way it is written.

As a lawyer, Beowulf thinks of policy in terms of the actual bills that would need to be passed into law. This involves getting from here (status quo) to there (desired objective), along with what it would take politically to do so. This is something that economists and a lot of public policy people miss.

Monetary Realism
Health is the War of The State
Beowulf

Mark Weisbrot — Medicaid Saved Obamacare and Single-Payer May Be Back on the Agenda Sooner Than You Think

Some polls have shown majorities in favor of single payer health care. In the last election cycle we also went rather quickly from a widely believed politician-and-media-backed falsehood that Social Security was in serious financial trouble, to even Hillary Clinton saying that benefits needed to be expanded, not cut. That is the direction that the country is going, with Bernie Sanders, despite losing the Democratic presidential primary, being one of the most popular politicians in the country; and Trump in the doghouse with 37 percent approval....

Counterpunch
Medicaid Saved Obamacare and Single-Payer May Be Back on the Agenda Sooner Than You Think

Mark Weisbrot

Marcia Angell — Medicare for All should replace Obamacare

Paying for Medicare for All would require an increase in taxes — perhaps an earmarked progressive income tax for the purpose — but that increase would be offset by the elimination of premiums and out-of-pocket costs, and the slowing of inflation that stems from our market-based system. 

Angell buys into the false government as business or household analogy. Of course, a medical expert could not be expected to know the difference between an issuer of a sovereign currency like the USD and those who use the currency and must obtain it since they don't issue it.

The reality is the the federal government issues its currency and its cost of capital is zero, including interest payments if government chooses to include this even though it is not necessary operationally.

The only constraint is the availability of real resources. Public investment can augment real resources  through issuance at no cost of capital. As long as real resources are available for purchase in the currency they can be deployed. There is no affordability problem.

Issues might arise where government competes with the private sector for scarce resources. That would occur at full employment if government wishes to continue to expand services.

USA Today — Opinion
Medicare for All should replace Obamacare

Marcia Angell | corresponding member of the Faculty of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Faculty Associate in the Center for Bioethics, and former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine
ht Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism

Ralph Nader — 21 Ways Canada's Single-Payer System Beats Obamacare

Canadian style single-payer healthcare is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal—unlike the US's labyrinthine ACA

AlterNet
21 Ways Canada's Single-Payer System Beats Obamacare
Ralph Nader

PNHP — ‘Medicare for All’ Would Cover Everyone, Save Billions in First Year: New Study

Physicians for a National Health Program

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

‘Medicare for All’ Would Cover Everyone, Save Billions in First Year: New Study

Economist says Canadian-style, single-payer health plan would reap huge savings from reduced paperwork and from negotiated drug prices, enough to pay for quality coverage for all – at less cost to families and businesses

WASHINGTON - July 31 - Upgrading the nation’s Medicare program and expanding it to cover people of all ages would yield more than a half-trillion dollars in efficiency savings in its first year of operation, enough to pay for high-quality, comprehensive health benefits for all residents of the United States at a lower cost to most individuals, families and businesses.

That’s the chief finding of a new fiscal study by Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. There would even be money left over to help pay down the national debt, he said.

Friedman says his analysis shows that a nonprofit single-payer system based on the principles of the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act, H.R. 676, introduced by Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., and co-sponsored by 45 other lawmakers, would save an estimated $592 billion in 2014. That would be more than enough to cover all 44 million people the government estimates will be uninsured in that year and to upgrade benefits for everyone else.

“No other plan can achieve this magnitude of savings on health care,” Friedman said.

His findings were released this morning at a congressional briefing in the Cannon House Office Building hosted by Public Citizen and Physicians for a National Health Program, to be followed by a 1 p.m. news conference with Rep. Conyers. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and others in observance of Medicare’s 48th anniversary at the House Triangle near the Capitol steps. A copy of Friedman’s full report, with tables and charts, is available here.

Friedman said the savings would come from slashing the administrative waste associated with today’s private health insurance industry ($476 billion) and using the new, public system’s bargaining muscle to negotiate pharmaceutical drug prices down to European levels ($116 billion).

“These savings would be more than enough to fund $343 billion in improvements to our health system, including the achievement of truly universal coverage, improved benefits, and the elimination of premiums, co-payments and deductibles, which are major barriers to people seeking care,” he said.

Friedman said the savings would also fund $51 billion in transition costs such as retraining displaced workers from the insurance industry and phasing out investor-owned, for-profit delivery systems.

Over the next decade, the system’s savings from reduced health inflation (“bending the cost curve”), thanks to cost-control methods such as negotiated fees, lump-sum payments to hospitals, and capital planning, would amount to an estimated $1.8 trillion.

“Paradoxically, by expanding Medicare to everyone we’d end up saving billions of dollars annually,” he said. “We’d be safeguarding Medicare’s fiscal integrity while enhancing the nation’s health for the long term.”

Friedman said the plan would be funded by maintaining current federal revenues for health care and imposing new, modest tax increases on very high income earners. It would also be funded by a small increase in payroll taxes on employers, who would no longer pay health insurance premiums, and a new, very small tax on stock and bond transactions.

“Such a financing scheme would vastly simplify how the nation pays for care, restore free choice of physician, guarantee all necessary medical care, improve patient health and, because it would be financed by a program of progressive taxation, result in 95 percent of all U.S. households saving money,” Friedman said.

Friedman’s findings are consistent with other research showing large savings from a single-payer plan. Single-payer fiscal studies by other economists, such as Kenneth E. Thorpe (2005), have arrived at similar conclusions, as have studiesconducted by the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accountability Office in the early 1990s. Other studies have documented the administrative efficiency and other benefits of Canada’s single-payer system in comparison with the current U.S. system.

Friedman’s research was commissioned by Physicians for a National Health Program, a nonprofit research and educational organization of more than 18,000 doctors nationwide, which wanted to find out how much a single-payer system would cost today and how it could be financed.

“Funding H.R. 676:  The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act – How we can afford a national single-payer health plan in 2014,” by Gerald Friedman, Ph.D., Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

###

Physicians for a National Health Program is a single issue organization advocating a universal, comprehensive single-payer national health program. PNHP has more than 15,000 members and chapters across the United States.