‘Medicare for All’: Is It Popular? And Is It the Same as Britain’s System?
As leading Democrats embrace Senator Bernie Sanders’s proposal to vastly expand Medicare to cover all Americans, Republicans are fighting back with familiar critiques of such a single-payer system.
Mr. Sanders argued for his “Medicare for all” legislation in an Op-Ed published in The New York Times on Wednesday, while his Republican colleagues dismissed the idea in a news conference. Here’s an assessment of their claims. The British system differs from Mr. Sanders’s plan in structure. The National Health Service owns and runs hospitals, which British citizens can visit usually free of charge, and has contracts with doctors. Under Mr. Sanders’s plan, every American would receive insurance through Medicare, but the government would not run hospitals...