In April of this year, senator Bernie Sanders once more introduced his trademark “Medicare for All” legislation, which would, if passed, ban private health insurance and bring to the United States single-payer health care, in which government administrators manage heath decisions according to their own expertise and fund it through tax revenue, becoming the “single payer” for all services. Although the bill is doomed in a Republican-controlled Congress, single-payer remains a progressive priority.
Many partisans for the cause have taken the fight to state capitals. In the last two years, California, Oregon, and Colorado have considered legislation that would similarly prohibit private insurance and install a single state-run alternative. Legislators in Washington, Connecticut, and even Florida introduced single-payer bills this year. Vermont set out to create a single-payer system in 2011—but abandoned the effort in 2014 after concluding that it couldn’t afford to do so.
The obsession with government-run health care ignores the increasingly grim news coming out of countries with single-payer. To take just one example, the latest data from the Canadian government show that nearly 5% of all deaths in that country in 2023 came about via state-assisted suicide. When the state foots the bill for health care, it has a monetary interest in the deaths rather
