OK, this probably won't be the most exciting Congressional hearing in the world, but it's a pretty important one both historically and for practical purposes. Any major healthcare reform bill will have to first be run through the Congressional Budget Office's scoring process...and before the CBO can do that, they first have to lay out the ground rules, which they did earlier this month.
Anyway, you can watch the hearings above; here's the details...which are pretty simple: Three CBO wonks will be testifying and questioned.
Key Design Components and Considerations for Establishing a Single-Payer Health Care System
Had a great time discussing #MedicareForAll opposite @charles_gaba on Medicare for America for Ferndale Dems. Happy to report no one was called a neoliberal or a Bernie bro.
A few minutes ago the Congressional Budget Office released a new report on a national, universal single payer healthcare system (commonly known as "Medicare for All" these days, although that's a bit of a misnomer since the proposed "Medicare for All" bills are quite different from today's definition of Medicare).
It's important to note that while this report came from the CBO, it is not a budget analysis of either the House or Senate MFA bills; it instead lays out the structural components which would be required to be in place in order to put such a system together and, I presume, in order to run such a budget analysis.
I'm swamped today between the rollouts of both the Choose Medicare Act and the revised Medicare for America Act as well as this new CBO report, so for the moment I'll just repost the summary and link to the report itself, along with a few notes as I'm able to add them:
Over the past month or two, I've written a couple of pieces which explored the whole "MFA would eliminate private health insurance" issue.
My main point was that while most MFA activists have long insisted that eliminating (or virtually eliminating) private health insurance companies is not only a feature but the entire point of moving to single payer, ever since Kamala Harris walked back her “get rid of all that!” comment in a CNN Town Hall the next day, I’ve seen some MFA activists fall all over themselves to suddenly insist that “no, no...there’d still be plenty of room for private insurance, really!”
