Bernie Sanders: Why We Need Medicare for All<br />Under this legislation, every family in America would receive comprehensive coverage,<br />and middle-class families would save thousands of dollars a year by eliminating their private insurance costs as we move to a publicly funded program.<br />In the first year, benefits to older people would be expanded to include dental care, vision coverage<br />and hearing aids, and the eligibility age for Medicare would be lowered to 55.<br />By the fourth year, every man, woman and child in the country would be covered by Medicare for All.<br />Or do we maintain a system that is enormously expensive, wasteful<br />and bureaucratic, and is designed to maximize profits for big insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, Wall Street and medical equipment suppliers?<br />Layers of bureaucracy associated with the administration of hundreds of individual<br />and complicated insurance plans is stunningly wasteful, costing us hundreds of billions of dollars a year.<br />These were people who had no insurance or could not afford out-of-pocket costs imposed by their insurance plans.<br />In the second year, the eligibility age would be lowered to 45 and in the third year to 35.<br />We remain the only major country on earth that allows chief executives<br />and stockholders in the health care industry to get incredibly rich, while tens of millions of people suffer because they can’t get the health care they need.
