Medicare-for-All Opponents Aren’t Murderers
The claim that opponents of a single-payer health-care system are causing sick people to die borders on the absurd.
There might be better ways to frame the argument.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North AmericaHealth care is a major point of contention in the Democratic primary campaign. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren favor a single-payer system, while Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg support a federal insurance program to compete with private insurers, also known as the public option. Some fans of single-payer have begun to deploy a dire-sounding argument: failing to implement Medicare for All, they claim, would be tantamount to murder. For example, Libby Watson, a staff writer at the New Republic, tweeted:
Roosevelt Institute researcher Mike Konczal went so far as to calculate the “expected murders” that would result from pushing for a public option rather than Medicare for All.