Following Democrats’ election victories last Tuesday, socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called on senators to pass so-called “Medicare for All” legislation next year when Democrats take control of Congress.
Except that his bill wouldn’t expand Medicare — it would end it. The truth about Sanders’ bill speaks volumes about how the left views facts as mere trifling inconveniences and treats seniors as pawns in its push for a European-style welfare state.
Medicare for None
You don’t have to take my word for it. Just look at Section 901(a)(1) on pages 100-101 of the so-called “Medicare for All Act” that Sanders introduced last April:
Title XVIII of the Social Security Act refers to the current Medicare program, meaning the bill ends the existing Medicare benefit when the new program takes over. Section 701(d) on page 96 of the bill includes a related, important detail:
This language liquidates every single dollar from the Medicare Trust Funds — one of which covers hospital spending (Part A) and one of which covers outpatient spending (Parts B and D) — and deposits those dollars in a fund to finance Sanders’ new socialized medicine scheme, which also happens to be called “Medicare.”
Sanders’ ‘Big Lie’
On one level, this tactic amounts to a bait-and-switch or a game of three-card monte: a con game in which Sanders creates whatever system he would like, calls it “Medicare,” and assumes the public won’t discover the difference. Howard Gleckman, an analyst at the left-leaning Urban Institute, wrote an article in 2019 titled “Medicare for All Has Nothing to Do with Medicare. Call It Something Else”:
What Sanders is proposing is not Medicare for all. It is far more generous — and more expensive. It would be funded much differently. And its relationship with private insurance would be nothing like today’s Medicare. Sanders would, in fact, replace the current Medicare program. … You can call it [i.e., the Sanders bill] many things — from ambitious to unrealistic. But please don’t call it Medicare.
Neither Sanders nor anyone else on the left has changed the messaging on the legislation in the years since. This raises an obvious question: If Sanders can’t even level with voters on the name of his bill, what else about a single-payer system of socialized medicine is he hiding from them?
The Left’s Slush Fund
Sanders’ proposal to abolish Medicare represents far more than just a political bait-and-switch. It also reveals how Democrats view Medicare not as a sacred bond to help our nation’s elderly and individuals with disabilities, but rather as a slush fund to be raided to finance their next big-government scheme.
After all, why else would Sanders propose plundering dollars specifically allocated for seniors to finance health coverage for Big Tech billionaires? One of many ironies about his legislation: While the current Medicare program imposes means testing, forcing wealthy seniors to pay a far greater share of their Part B and Part D premiums, Sanders’ legislation includes no means-testing provision. Rather than making people like Mark Zuckerberg pay their “fair share” of their health care costs, Sanders would give them “free” care, funded in part by trust-fund dollars previously allocated toward seniors.
The fact is, Democrats frequently treat Medicare as a piggy bank, a slush fund to finance other spending programs. They raided it once, by hundreds of billions of dollars, to fund Obamacare in 2010, then raided it again a dozen years later to fund an expansion of Obamacare subsidies. In 2021, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., even proposed raiding Medicare to pay for an infrastructure package.
Little wonder then that Democrats would want to abolish the program entirely. I noted at the time of Joe Biden’s infamous “we finally beat Medicare” comment during the 2024 presidential debate that, at one point or another, virtually all major Democrats have sponsored legislation that would abolish Medicare. The list runs from Biden himself to Kamala Harris, Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and California’s Gov.-elect Xavier Becerra. Even incoming Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., recently co-sponsored Sanders’ bill, illustrating that he too wants to abolish Medicare.
The Upcoming Stakes
Unfortunately, conservatives, often hesitant to discuss health care in depth, have for years failed to note how readily Democrats have worked to undermine Medicare. But the debate Democrats seem intent on forcing in the coming Congress gives conservatives another opportunity to demonstrate the stakes.
Should our nation abandon a commitment to seniors to help fund “free” health care for Big Tech executives and billionaires? That’s one of many policy changes the Sanders bill would make. Conservatives can develop a winning message on this and other elements of Democrats’ dangerous health care agenda, but only if they are willing to engage.
