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Medicare for All an inept name for single-payer health care

The Daily Herald - 6/2/2021

Single-payer healthcare is confusingly labeled Medicare for All. Early explainers of single-payer health care simplistically used our Medicare system as a rough approximation of how a single-payer system would function. Then media for dummies repeated the name Medicare for All until it became mistaken for single-payer. Which helped right-wing media fool the unwary into equating Medicaid with Medicare with single-payer health care. These are three differently operating systems whose only commonality is health care. Funding, administration, clientele, coverage and costs differ between them.

The "pro" side of two May 16Sunday Herald guest commentaries assumed readers already knew that. The "con" side assumed readers didn't and could thus be propagandized by intermixing phony Medicare statistics with Oregon Medicaid anecdotes with misrepresentations of Canadian health care in a commentary supposedly about U.S. single-payer health care. Then, in another propagandistic trick, the con side cited a guesstimated $3 trillion cost for U.S. single-payer health care without noting yearly U.S. combined public/private health care costs were already $2.9 trillion by 2013 (ballotpedia.org). The pro side didn't address costs but could have noted that single-payer is more economical than today's system of public health taxes plus private premiums.

In effect, the two commentaries were talking past each other rather than presenting different perspectives on the same aspects of single-payer health care. The Daily Herald could help taxpayers and everyone who'll ever need health care by soliciting pro/con debate focused on the same details in each commentary.

Paul Heckel

Snohomish

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