We Should Move Away from Employer-Based Insurance, But NOT Towards Single Payer
The left continues to seek ways to politically capitalize on the coronavirus crisis. Multiple proposals in the past several weeks would replace a potential decline in employer-provided health insurance with government-run care.
One analysis released earlier this month found the coronavirus pandemic could cause anywhere from 12 to 35 million Americans to lose their employer-provided coverage, as individuals lose jobs due to virus-related shutdowns. Of course, these coverage losses could remain temporary in some cases, as firms reopen and rehire furloughed workers.
But these lefties do have a point: The United States should move away from employer-provided health coverage. It just shouldn’t rely upon a government-run model to do so.
Biden: Let’s Expand an Insolvent Program
Days after his last remaining rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, former vice president and presumptive nominee Joe Biden endorsed a plan to expand Medicare. Biden’s statement didn’t include details. Instead, he “directed [his] team to come up with a plan to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60.”
One big problem with Biden’s proposed expansion: Medicare already faces an insolvency date of 2026, a date the current economic turmoil will almost certainly accelerate. He claimed that “any new federal cost associated with this option would be financed out of general revenues to protect the Medicare trust fund.” But Biden didn’t explain why he would choose to expand a program rapidly approaching insolvency as it is.
Another problem for Biden seems more political. As this space has previously noted, in 2017 and 2018, the former vice president and his wife received more than $13 million in book and speech revenue as profits from a corporation rather than wage income. By doing so, they avoided paying nearly $400,000 in payroll taxes that fund—you guessed it!—Medicare.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to ask the obvious question: If Biden loves Medicare so much that he wants to expand it, why didn’t he pay his Medicare taxes?
Medicare Extra
Other liberals have proposals that would expand the government’s role in health care still further. Examining the impact of coronavirus on coverage, and analyzing a movement away from employer-provided care, Ezra Klein endorsed the Medicare Extra plan as superior to Biden’s original health-care proposal for a so-called “public option.” Towards the end of his analysis, Klein makes crystal clear why he supports this approach:
[Medicare Extra] creates a system that, while not single-payer, is far more integrated than anything we have now: A public system with private options, rather than a private system with fractured public options.
Medicare Extra, originally developed by the Center for American Progress and introduced in legislative form as the Medicare for America Act by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), goes beyond the Biden plan. Both would likely lead to a single-payer system, but Medicare Extra would do so much more quickly.
Biden’s original health care plan would create a government-run “option,” similar to Medicare, into which anyone could enroll. Individuals could use Obamacare subsidies (which Biden’s proposal would increase) to enroll in the government-run plan.
Notably, Biden’s proposal eliminates Obamacare’s subsidy “firewall,” in which anyone with an offer of “affordable” employer coverage does not qualify for subsidized exchange coverage. Removing this “firewall” will encourage a migration towards the exchanges, and the government-run plan.
By contrast, Medicare Extra would go three steps further in consolidating government-run care. First, it would combine existing government programs like Medicare and Medicaid into the new “Medicare Extra” rubric. Second, the legislation would automatically enroll people into Medicare Extra at birth, giving the government-run program an in-built bias, and a clear path towards building a coverage monopoly.
Third, Medicare Extra would not just allow individuals with an offer of employer-sponsored coverage to enroll in the Medicare Extra program, it would require the employer to “cash out” the dollar value of his contribution, and give those funds to the employee to fund that worker’s Medicare Extra plan.
The combination of this “cash out” requirement (not included in Biden’s proposal) and the other regulations on employer coverage included in Medicare Extra would result in a totally government-run system within a few short years. After all, if businesses have to pay the same amount to fund their employees’ coverage whether they maintain an employer plan or not, what incentive do they have to stay in the health insurance game?
Let Individuals Maintain Their Own Coverage
Both Biden’s proposals and Medicare Extra would consolidate additional power and authority within the government system—liberals’ ultimate objective. By contrast, the Trump administration has worked to give Americans access to options other than employer-provided insurance that individuals control, not the government.
Regulations finalized by the administration last year could in time revolutionize health insurance coverage. The rules allow for employers to provide tax-free contributions to employees through Health Reimbursement Arrangements, which workers can use to buy the health insurance plans they prefer. Best of all, employees will own these health plans, not the business, so they can take their coverage with them when they change jobs or retire.
It will of course take time for this transition to take root, as businesses learn more about Health Reimbursement Arrangements and workers obtain private insurance plans that they can buy, hold, and keep. But if allowed to flourish, this reform could remove Americans’ reliance on employers to provide health coverage, while preventing a further expansion of government meddling in our health-care system—both worthy objectives indeed.
This post was originally published at The Federalist.