Medicare for All

The best way to piss-off the establishment (D or R) is to push for Medicare for all.

See below from  The Post-Hope Democrats | Jacobin:

Here’s an interesting graph based on data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based quasi-official think tank for the world’s rich countries. It shows the share of GDP devoted to health care for a subset of the OECD’s thirty-four members, divided into public and private. (Put them together and you get the total.)There are several striking features in this graph:

• Most striking of all is how far ahead of the pack the US is: we spend 16.4 percent of GDP on health care, compared to a 10.1 percent average for all the other countries shown. (That’s the dotted vertical line on the right.) And recall that all those other countries cover almost their entire populations, unlike the US, where a tenth of the population is uninsured(and many of the insured have terrible coverage), with little change since the drop when Obamacare first took effect. (Gallup has 12 percent of the population uninsured, slightly higher than the Census Bureau, though with a similar trajectory of initial decline followed by flatlining.)

• Another striking, though less obvious, thing is that US public spending alone, 7.9 percent of GDP, is just 0.1 point below the average of 8 percent. In other words, the government already spends as much as many other countries do while accomplishing far less. That 7.9 percent is also not much less than the entire health bill for Italy, Australia, and Britain, public and private combined.

• Yet another striking thing is the outlandishly large share of private spending on health care: 8.5 percent of GDP, more than four times the average of the other countries and almost three times Canada’s private share.

• Does all that spending produce better outcomes? Seems not: our life expectancy, 78.8 years, is three years shorter than the average of all the other countries.

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