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Looks like this time around we're getting to the level of seriousness where trade-offs and winners-and-losers will get explored. Which is good! But it underscore the risks that primary candidates run in hitching their wagons to a very speculative idea without fully exploring those trade-offs.
Hospitals Stand to Lose Billions Under ‘Medicare for All’
The Stuart Altman quote is the crux of it:
This would be uncharted territory.
Hospitals Stand to Lose Billions Under ‘Medicare for All’
The yawning gap between payments to hospitals by Medicare and by private health insurers for the same medical services may prove the biggest obstacle for advocates of “Medicare for all,” a government-run system.
If Medicare for all abolished private insurance and reduced rates to Medicare levels — at least 40 percent lower, by one estimate — there would most likely be significant changes throughout the health care industry, which makes up 18 percent of the nation’s economy and is one of the nation’s largest employers.
Some hospitals, especially struggling rural centers, would close virtually overnight, according to policy experts. Others, they say, would try to offset the steep cuts by laying off hundreds of thousands of workers and abandoning lower-paying services like mental health.
Dr. Adam Gaffney, the president of Physicians for a National Health Program, warned advocates of a single-payer system like Medicare for all not to seize this opportunity to extract huge savings from hospitals. “The line here can’t be and shouldn’t be soak the hospitals,” he said. “You don’t need insurance companies for Medicare for all,” Dr. Gaffney added. “You need hospitals.”
The Stuart Altman quote is the crux of it:
Whether hospitals would be able to adapt to sharply lower payments is unclear.
“It would force health care systems to go on a very serious diet,” said Stuart Altman, a health policy professor at Brandeis University. “I have no idea what would happen. Nor does anyone else.”
This would be uncharted territory.