Medicare for All Would End the Nightmare of “Insurance Churn”
The claim that “if you like your insurance, you can keep it” is the biggest lie in US politics. Your boss has more of a say over your health insurance than you do, and most workers could lose their health plan at any minute. That’s why we need Medicare for All.
Activists rally against the GOP health care plan outside of the Metropolitan Republican Club, July 5, 2017 in New York City.Drew Angerer / Getty
Opponents of Medicare for All often argue that its chief problem is that it forces people to change their current insurance plans (Krugman, Chait, Rattner). The argument these opponents make is not that Medicare for All will cause people to go uninsured. Rather, it is that it would force them to switch. This switching, called “insurance churn,” is held out as a harm in and of itself, even though the Medicare plan people would be forced to switch to would, presumably, be good.
For many months now, I’ve been arguing against this view by pointing out a simple fact: our current system also forces people to switch insurance. Worse than that, it forces them to switch insurance all the time.
The following is just a partial list of reasons people lose their health insurance plan even when they’d rather not.
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