Single Payer. Medicare for All. These slogans for government-run health care proposals do little to illuminate the proposals’ details or implications. This section takes a deep dive into what these proposals would do by examining the leading congressional bills to advance them. These bills enjoy broad support from congressional Democrats, sponsored by more than half of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 14 U.S. Senators.
The bills contain shockingly authoritarian measures. Americans could not keep their existing health plans. Instead, virtually all private coverage would be outlawed, and people would be enrolled in a new government health plan. Federal officials would have near-total control over America’s health care financing, organization and delivery—meaning that nearly one-fifth of the economy would be run by the Washington bureaucracy. Politicians and bureaucrats in Washington would determine all benefits and coverage, and collect vast amounts of data to implement and enforce the government program. Doctors would face severe restrictions on their ability to practice medicine outside of the government program. While promising equality in coverage, only elites could access anything other than what government officials determine to be in Americans’ best interest. And, while none of the bills contain any funding provisions, they do authorize a massive amount of new federal spending. Heritage Foundation scholars estimate that such an expansive program would require over a 20 percent tax increase on income. What the authors of these bills lack in forethought, they more than make up for with their ambitious attempt to centralize power in Washington.
In this section, Heritage Foundation scholar Robert E. Moffit, PhD, takes a close look at the House and Senate bills’ details and shows just how sweeping a change the authors of these proposals envision.
