A healthcare expert who has analyzed Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Medicare for All” plan says it will lead to rationing of care in order to keep costs down and produce longer wait times.
“The more radical part of [Warren’s plan] is the very, very bold rationing scheme for health care,” policy expert Christopher Pope, a scholar at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, the Free Beacon.
“A big part of how she tries to make the numbers work is really very tightly restricting access to care and funding of health care services.”
Other experts have said that Warren’s plan is reliant on overly optimistic assumptions in terms of costs and savings. According to her campaign, she is forecasting an additional $20.5 trillion in federal spending over a decade, which is $14 trillion short of an analysis and cost by the Left-leaning Urban Institute.
In order to cut $14 trillion in costs, her plan would have to dramatically cut spending.
Warren, a top 2020 Democratic presidential contender, has said she wants to bring healthcare spending growth more in line with growth in GDP, cutting it from around 18 percent to 4 percent over the next ten years.
The Warren plan also envisions offsetting low revenues by cutting administrative bloat and compensating “overpaid specialties.”
But Pope said it’s very likely such a plan would lead to hospital closures even as others are forced to cut service they currently provide, forcing patients to pay for care with longer wait times instead of money.
“If hospitals are expected to make do with much less money than they would currently, but expected to care for more people, they’re going to have to really tightly restrict the access to services that people are able to get,” Pope said.
“She’s basically proposing to cap the amount of health care spending as a total of what she will commit to, but especially the amount of money that hospitals will get,” Pope said of Warren’s plan.
“In practice, it’s going to mean waiting lists.… it’s going to mean that people aren’t going to be able to access care, especially high-quality care to the extent that they have been able to.”