STAT January 20, 2020
Lost in the shuffle of competing plans for saving health care is the radical call by Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for “no more copays, no more deductibles” as part of their “Medicare for All” plans.
(The plans are actually misnamed, since regular Medicare has 20% copays with no cap — the opposite of what they are proposing — but I’ll leave that aside.)
Doing away with copays and deductibles would represent a complete reversal of U.S. health care policy. In the last decade alone, deductibles have risen 212%, which is about 10 times the rate of inflation or wages. And that’s exactly what federal law has encouraged. The Affordable Care Act capped annual out-of-pocket payments at...