There are various ways to achieve near-universal health insurance coverage using some form of automatic coverage. A single-payer system is one approach, and it could be implemented in different ways.
Today, I will discuss how single-payer health care systems based on the Medicare fee-for-service program would affect our nation's health care and budget and its economy. The Congressional Budget Office has analyzed five options in detail among many possibilities. Those options illustrate the effects of differences in providers' payment rates, patients' cost sharing, and the system's coverage of long-term services and supports. The system proposed by Chairman Sanders in S. 1129, the Medicare for All Act of 2019, is like the options in some ways and different in others; CBO has not analyzed S. 1129.
