The other two

Since I've been digging into some of the presidential candidates' campaign promises for health insurance and health care, I decided I might as well look at Buttigieg's and Harris's as well.

According to Buttigieg's campaign site, he is proposing Medicare for All Who Want It, as a public option. Supposedly this will put pressure on private health insurers to improve their products and service. His site says that over time, however, this will propel a transition to Medicare For All.

Having a public health insurance option and forcing private health insurers to compete against it is also a feature of Biden's plan.  However, the playing field is clearly not level in such a scenario, being heavily tilted in favor of the government program, which can draw on tax dollars and practically write its own rules.  I'm really getting tired of counting the avenues through which Democrats have attacked, are attacking, and are saying that they will attack in the future, private health insurance.

Not that I think private health insurance companies are good; but on the whole they can do much less damage than a nationalized bureaucracy can.  The right to vote with your wallet is a very important one.

Another similarity between Buttigieg and Biden is that their plans include expanding automatic enrollments of people in government health programs.  So much for Privacy and Choice.

Kamala Harris, according to her campaign site, is proposing a ten-year transition to Medicare For All, with automatic enrollment of newborns! Under her plan, some of the Medicare plans will be offered by private insurers. She promises to keep them on a very tight leash.

The ability of any of these candidates to reform health insurance coverage is going to be very limited, unless the Democrats can recapture the Senate, since the President does not have the power to legislate. I don't know how many seats will be up for grabs in 2020.

I also found an article on the American Medical Association site that describes some of their resolutions.  Apparently the AMA supports the Affordable Care Act, proposes some changes to it--including fixing the "family glitch", hopes for universal health care coverage, and has concerns about the costs of Medicare For All--up to $32 trillion dollars in increased federal spending over ten years?!? There are some older articles about dealing with the 2017 changes in Medicare payments, and how doctors can navigate the pay-for-performance structure.

The problem with performance incentives for doctors is that they lead to compliance directives for patients...so much for Privacy and Choice...again.

I was looking at the AMA site because I believe that health care costs could be lower if the supply of doctors was larger. Some years ago, I looked at the doctors-to-population ratios of the United States and a couple of other countries. The United States was not that bad, but seemed to be not all that great, either.