April 9, 2025
American Action Forum (AAF) recently published insights into the potential costs of changing the U.S. health care system to a single-payer system, sometimes referred to as “Medicare for All” (M4A). Over the past decade, numerous Democrats have proposed that patients would be “better off” with a single-payer system, where the federal government is the sole payer for health care services.
AAF’s new financial analysis of two popular M4A proposals follows a series of “Reality Check-Up” articles outlining other issues and inefficiencies with single-payer systems. Noting that “sometimes, good policy can be unpopular – while bad policy can be popular, as it is here,” AAF argues that the “astoundingly expensive” cost (multi-trillion dollars above the current health care expenditures) of M4A “should rule it out of consideration.” For example, Kamala Harris’s M4A proposal while running for president in 2020 was projected to cost $4.1 trillion, nearly double the cost of Social Security benefits and “dwarfs even national security” spending.
AAF concludes by noting “even doubling all current federal income and corporate taxes would not fully cover the estimated cost of M4A,” making such a system unsustainable.
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