Medicare for All did in fact include eliminating private health insurance. the House version (of legislation) says it the most explicitly, that it is our moral imperative to eliminate profit from the healthcare sector.
the Medicare for All eliminates private health insurance, consistent with its directive to eliminate profit, also consistent with single-payer, you can't have a single anything unless you're going to have entry barriers to the second and the third. But it also requires all health providers to become non-profit, so no profit allowed.
Medicare for All in the version that I've described, prohibiting private health insurance, goes back to 2005 or so. It's about 15 years old. Didn't get a lot of readership or many votes, even, or sponsors, until the last four years or so. Then most of the Democrats are sponsors or cosponsors of that in Congress.
they didn't advertise the part of eliminating private health insurance. They said single-payer, so you would think, if you did a little logic, you'd say, "Okay. Well, if there's just one payer, there must be a prohibition on the second one."
most of those countries that had so-called single-payer plans backed off and allowed private health insurance. None of them have free healthcare at the point of service, in the sense that all you do is show your card and you get it. No, you have to pay something in Sweden when you go to the doctor or you have a hospital visit.
I used to live in the UK and it's not single-payer because they do have private health insurance if people want to opt-in to it. But I always tell people, it's like you saw what... Like the average American would not put up with what people put up with with the NHS.
In the case of insurance, adverse selection is the tendency of those in dangerous jobs or high-risk lifestyles to purchase products like life insurance.
The theory emphasizes adverse selection and the idea that people won't sign up for insurance until they're sick, that sort of behavior. And that happens in the real world, but… in this model there's no subsidies.
Obamacare...has huge subsidies. And that's enough to get people to avoid what might otherwise be destructive behavior. You don't need a mandate on top of it. In fact, I say if somebody turns down a government subsidy, Trump ought to send them a thank-you note, or whoever's the president, because they're helping us tax payers.
in our study that we did of this in the White House, we did have some effect in that dimension, that there would be people who were paying full price who wouldn't sign up and that might be some kind of loss to the rest of the people in the insurance pool. But it's overwhelmed by the subsidy effect that we're talking about.
the House version (of legislation) says it the most explicitly, that it is our moral imperative to eliminate profit from the healthcare sector.