Medicare for All

TAKEAWAY: Medicare for All

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  
What do you think about the growing call for Medicare for all?

FRAZIER:  
So I have to say that the call for Medicare for all is one of those things where, again, in politics, we don’t really want to sit down and have a serious conversation about what the economics of what that really means. I think if you look at our system, the private system that we have—there are different systems around the world. There are systems that are socialized medicine. There are systems where they’re single-payer. There are systems where there’s private payers plus government. We have a hybrid system in our country, where most of us are insured through private means, but there’s Medicaid and Medicare and all of those things.

I think if anyone who’s serious about what it would cost to implement what people are calling Medicare for all—you know we can’t afford it. It’s not affordable. And by the way, people who are covered under private insurance want to have enough control over their insurance that they’ll resist it politically. So I think the idea of Medicare for all is one of those things that has—if you don’t think about it more than a second, it might sound like it has enormous rhetorical appeal. But it’s never going to happen in our country for a whole host of reasons. We won’t be able to afford it, and there will be opposition from people who sort of like their private health plans. Remember, when we went to Obamacare, the promise was, and if you like your coverage, you can keep it. Right? Because people are going to want to have control over their own health care.

But still we have the problem in the private situation—the free market does a good job of allocating scarce resources, but it hasn’t worked in health care, because a lot of people don’t have access to the drugs that I use. So, the question to me isn’t about Medicare for all. It’s really about how do we ensure that that subset of our population that can’t afford to have access to medicines—we make a social commitment to those people?