“Medicare for All” (M4A) proposals aim to expand healthcare coverage while taking advantage of lower overhead costs in Medicare relative to private health insurance. This discussion presents related new analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget Model. Under current law, we estimate that households without medical care would more than double over the next 40 years. We project that extending the existing level of Medicare benefits to the pre-retiree population could improve health, longevity, the population size, worker productivity and the size of the economy. However, the exact financing mechanism is critical: we project that several of the financing mechanisms currently being discussed would shrink the economy. This analysis forms the framework of our projections of specific M4A reforms, including Senator Sanders' plan, which we will soon release.
Please contact us at budgetmodel@wharton.upenn.edu if you have any questions about the event.
Panelists:
Mark V. Pauly, PhD, is Bendheim Professor in the Department of Health Care Management, Professor of Health Care Management, and Business and Public Policy at The Wharton School and Professor of Economics in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. A former commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Commission, Dr. Pauly has been a consultant to the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and served on the Medicare Technical Advisory Panel. He is Co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics and Co-editor of the recently published Handbook of Health Economics, Volume 2. Dr. Pauly has been elected President of the American Society of Health Economists this year. He is the 2012 winner of the William B. Graham Prize for Health Services Research and the 2012 recipient of the University of Pennsylvania Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring.
Felix Reichling is a Senior Economist at the Penn Wharton Budget Model where he focuses on analyzing the macroeconomic effects of changes in healthcare policy. Before joining Penn, Felix was Chief of the Fiscal Policy Analysis Unit in the Congressional Budget Office’s Macroeconomic Analysis Divisions where his focused on analyzing how changes in fiscal policy affect the economy and how those changes feed back into the federal budget (dynamic scoring). Felix received his Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Kent Smetters is the Boettner (pronounced “Bent-Nur”) Chair Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Faculty Director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model. Previous positions include the Congressional Budget Office, the Kaiser Visiting Professor of Economics at Stanford, and Deputy Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury. He received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University.