A growing number of people want to set aside all of our current health care financing approaches as a country and set up Medicare For All as a Canadian like single payer system to cover every American and pay for our care.
When we spend three trillion dollars a year on health care and still have thirty million people without insurance, the possibility of covering everyone using the most direct and simple approach has some obvious appeal.
That Medicare for All approach being proposed to Congress today would be funded with a half dozen taxes that would include making income tax more progressive and inheritance tax levels significantly higher than they are now.
If we do have enough political momentum and enough alignment as a nation to actually replace everything in our health coverage world with a national Medicare for All system that is financed by those new taxes, then we should seriously consider going even further and spend the same amount of money buying better coverage and better care for everyone by setting up a Medicare Advantage program for Everyone and using that approach and program to cover all Americans.
Medicare Advantage has better benefits, better care coordination, better quality reporting, and a higher level of focus on better care outcomes and better care connectivity than standard Medicare.
Standard Medicare buys care entirely by the piece. Buying care entirely by the piece rewards bad care, bad care outcomes, bad health, and inefficient care connectivity.
Dr. David Shulkin once gave me this advice, “stop whining and complaining and lead with solutions.” To the many frustrated physicians in this country, this critique is a fair one. I took his words to heart.
This week MyFitnessPal announced that it had suffered a massive security breach which exposed or compromised 150 million MyFitnessPal accounts. Data that is affected included usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords. Luckily for those affected, the company claims that the affected data did not include government-issued identifiers or payment card data.
