How to pay for Medicare-for-all

Squeeze wasteful and abusive providers to provide a really good program for cheap

Pills.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Marcin Jastrzebski/iStock)

Medicare-for-all sounds great, but how do we pay for it?

In a normal country, the answer would be simple — just raise taxes. But in the United States, health care is so outlandishly expensive that the simple solution is anything but. Where Austria or Finland would be assured that a modest tax hike could (and did) cover everyone, America has to grapple with a bloated health-care sector eating up over 17 percent of GDP — nearly 5 points (or about $1 trillion) greater than Switzerland, the second-most expensive country.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.