Podcast: Mark Schlesinger Explains “Medicare for All”

In a podcast, Mark Schlesinger, Department Chair and Professor of Public Health, explains what “Medicare for All” means.  Schlesinger breaks it down into “two flavors” – 1) essentially would be Jacob Hacker’s plan, the Public Option,  where people could opt out of their employer-based private insurance and purchase Medicare on the exchange (in 2010 this Public Option portion of the ACA only lost by one vote in the Senate), and  2) essentially would be the Bernie Sanders plan, where everyone gets enrolled in a government program that replaces private insurance, and Medicaid. 

Schlesinger also mentions the possibility of a hybrid plan where people start buying into Medicare as a Public Option and once the program grows incrementally and reaches a threshold of enrollment of 70-80%, the government could then move everyone over to a Single Payer system. 

Listen to the entire podcast: