This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 28th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

If Medicare for all is too big of a stretch, what about just Medicare for more? A proposal on Capitol Hill would extend eligibility for Medicare to Americans aged 50 and older.

Cato's Michael Cannon says it's yet another proposal to expand problems caused by various previous government

interventions into American health care.

This seems a great deal like Medicare for All on the installment plan is that wrong?

That's just about right.

The far left in this country has coalesced around

basically Bernie Sanders proposal to expand the Medicare program

both by offering more benefits than it currently offers to seniors and

then expanding it to include seniors and everyone else.

That idea is very appealing to people who have not looked at the numbers and who don't understand

the effect that Medicare for all would

have on the quality of health care or the economy.

Medicare for all basically means there's one way of delivering health care and it has all sorts of problems

and we're not going to fix those problems we're just going to keep throwing more money at the system that we have.

On the tax side and the cost side a former trustee of the Medicare program has estimated that even if you believe all of Bernie Sanders fantastical assumptions about how Medicare would reduce prices for health care throughout the health sector,

it would still require doubling taxes on the American people.

And then if you don't believe those fantastical assumptions

because they're ridiculous then it would require more than doubling taxes and the

President's Council of Economic Advisors said that the impact on individual households

would be about $19,000. So they would be $19,000 poorer ones who account for both

...