Kamala Harris' 'Medicare for All' plan by the numbers
Karl Rove breaks down the details of the 2020 Democrat's plan to phase out employer-provided insurance in America.
Is government-run healthcare America’s future? Is Medicare-for-all a winning strategy in 2020?
Karl Rove said that if Americans embrace these plans presented by many Democratic candidates, “employer-provided coverage as we know it today is gone.”
Appearing on “America’s Newsroom” Monday, Rove claimed that these plans just aren’t attractive to middle Americans.
Referring to a new Medicare-for-all plan presidential hopeful Kamala Harris, D-Calif., released on Monday -- just days before the second Democratic debate in Detroit -- Rove explained: “Within 10 years, she phases out employer-provided insurance. You get a new Medicare plan. There’s auto-enrolment if you’re uninsured; you’re automatically enrolled in the Medicare plan.”
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Of her plan, Harris wrote: "At the end of the 10-year transition, every American will be a part of this new Medicare system. They will get insurance either through the new public Medicare plan or a Medicare plan offered by a private insurer within that system."
Harris says she would tax Wall Street stock trades at 0.2 percent, bond trades at 0.1 percent, and derivative transactions at 0.002 percent. She would also tax offshore corporate income at the same rate as domestic corporate income.
"This isn't about pursuing an ideology," Harris said. "This is about delivering for the American people.
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"We will allow private insurers to offer Medicare plans as part of this system that adhere to strict Medicare requirements on costs and benefits," writes Harris. "Medicare will set the rules of the road for these plans, including price and quality, and private insurance companies will play by those rules, not the other way around."
“So, what does that mean?” Rove questioned. “That means dump and run. Companies would know that within 10 years their employer-provided insurance coverage is going to be phased out.”
Rove said that if companies knew they wouldn’t be able to provide the same coverage in 10 years, there would be more of an incentive for them to drop their plans now.
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An issue Harris doesn't address is how insurers would get reimbursed. They are currently paid by the federal government. In some cases, enrollees pay a monthly premium in addition to their Medicare premium.
“So, what’s the role of private insurance? You can augment what you get for Medicare with private insurance paid for out of your own pocket. So, this is a face-saving gesture,” Rove exclaimed.
“But, the fact of the matter is: your policy under this is going away,” he said solemnly.
Rove lists three big issues “from the perspective of a lot of Americans with these Medicare-for-all procedures."
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The first is that Harris’s plan is the “end of employer-provided” coverage.
Secondly, he says, “there will be lots of wait times and delays in getting both to see a doctor and having a procedure.”
Thirdly and finally: “we’ve got to pay for it.”
“Rather than it now being paid for by businesses, it’s now going to be paid for by our general tax system which is heavily loaded on the personal income tax,” he told Hemmer. “There’s no way to pay for this simply by tackling billionaires and millionaires. Bernie Sanders is right; if you’re going to have this kind of a system, you’re going to have a big middle-class tax increase and none of those three things are attractive to middle Americans.”
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