JAMA Network March 2, 2021
The importance of access to health care and the financial protections that insurance should provide have never been more salient, and the potential consequences of the costs and gaps within the patchwork system in the US have never been more dire. Would the US population be better off with a simple, single-payer, uniform Medicare-for-all type of insurance plan?
Trade-offs abound in policy decisions about health insurance. Although the advantages of moving to such a single-payer plan might be appealing, there are large hidden costs that must be considered.
First, having a single health insurance plan to cover the heterogeneous US population can actually make people worse off than tailoring the generosity of benefits to different people’s needs and preferences....