Bernie Sanders: Why We Need Medicare for All
Under this legislation, every family in America would receive comprehensive coverage,
and middle-class families would save thousands of dollars a year by eliminating their private insurance costs as we move to a publicly funded program.
In the first year, benefits to older people would be expanded to include dental care, vision coverage
and hearing aids, and the eligibility age for Medicare would be lowered to 55.
By the fourth year, every man, woman and child in the country would be covered by Medicare for All.
Or do we maintain a system that is enormously expensive, wasteful
and bureaucratic, and is designed to maximize profits for big insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, Wall Street and medical equipment suppliers?
Layers of bureaucracy associated with the administration of hundreds of individual
and complicated insurance plans is stunningly wasteful, costing us hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
These were people who had no insurance or could not afford out-of-pocket costs imposed by their insurance plans.
In the second year, the eligibility age would be lowered to 45 and in the third year to 35.
We remain the only major country on earth that allows chief executives
and stockholders in the health care industry to get incredibly rich, while tens of millions of people suffer because they can’t get the health care they need.