Medicare (access) for all
A new plan from the Center for American Progress shows how health-care reform could go big—while also limiting the mess it makes.
As the Trump administration works to undermine Obamacare, a progressive consensus is emerging: next time there’s an opportunity for health-care reform, it should be bigger and bolder. One lesson of Obamacare is that there’s little political reward for moderating policy goals anymore; the 2009 law’s modest goals didn’t spare it from scorched-earth opposition. Nine years later, Senator Bernie Sanders’s sweeping “Medicare for all” bill has a long list of cosponsors.
Yet many who support Sanders’s goals are skeptical of his means. His path is quite disruptive: eliminate most private insurance altogether. But a second lesson, this one gleaned from earlier failed efforts, is that successful health-care reform includes building on whatever already works. Indeed, Obamacare’s less innovative provisions—the Medicaid expansion, the consumer protections in the group insurance market—are proving its most durable.
So how to apply both lessons? How can health reform go big while also limiting the mess it makes?
