Part 1: What Does “Healthcare for All” Actually Mean?

A little over a year ago, I began a series called Healthcare in America, an attempt to understand how our current healthcare system was built and how it actually operates.

Over more than forty articles, we looked at the major parts of that system: hospitals, physicians, pharmaceuticals, insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and the administrative structure that holds all of those pieces together.

That series was about understanding the system we have.

The question was simple:

How did we get here?

After spending that much time looking at healthcare in America, one thing became obvious. The healthcare debate often starts with the answer before we have agreed on the question.

That brings us to the next conversation:

Where do we go from here?

The phrase we hear most often is:

Healthcare for All.

It is a phrase that sounds simple. It suggests a basic idea that most people can understand: people should be able to receive needed medical care.

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The question is not simply whether America should have more government involvement or less.

The real question is:

What kind of healthcare system can provide the care people need, at a cost society can sustain, while maintaining the quality and innovation people expect?

That is where this conversation begins.

In the next part, we will examine one of the most widely discussed proposals for changing American healthcare: Medicare for All.

Before deciding whether it is the answer, we first need to understand what the proposal actually means, what problem it is designed to solve, and what changes would be required to make it work.

Healthcare For All, The Evolving Series