Medicare for All’s Price Tag? Even the CBO Can’t Say.
A much-anticipated deep dive into single-payer health care leaves out the potential cost, and for a good reason.
What do they want? Medicare for All. What will it cost? It’s complicated.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/BloombergThe Congressional Budget Office — a nonpartisan group that analyzes the cost of legislation for Congress — released a much-anticipated report Wednesday that analyzes the potential design and implementation of a single-payer health-care system along the lines of “Medicare for All.” Many on both sides of the health-care debate were hoping the report would include numbers with which to assail or support the plan; instead, they were disappointed.
The report doesn’t estimate the cost of any specific proposal or come to a conclusion about the rather foundational issue of whether a single-payer system would save the U.S. money. That’s because the only correct answer to that question is, it depends.