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Enthusiasm for expanding the government health-insurance program for the elderly to cover all U.S. citizens is growing among Democratic political hopefuls. According to Dylan Scott at Vox.com, “Nearly every single rumored 2020 candidate in the Senate has backed Senator Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all bill.” The idea polls well and the vast majority of seniors are satisfied with their current care under Medicare. The financing for such an ambitious program may derail these hopes. (Karl W. Smith, 8/27)

When a libertarian think-tank published a study of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) Medicare for All plan last month, it said that Sanders’s plan would cut payments to providers such as hospitals and doctors by 40 percent. The number suggested Sanders’s plan was wildly unrealistic, and that his plan for achieving universal health care relied on either massive cuts to doctors and hospitals or would prove far more expensive than he was otherwise saying. But Sanders’s supporters say the figure is misleading, and that doctors and hospitals could absorb cuts to their payments under the plan, which also would extend free government health insurance to every American in the country. (Jeff Stein, 8/27)

We asked Influencers what Florida’s next governor and Legislature should make their top priorities when it comes to healthcare. (8/27)

The health care system in the United States costs nearly double that of its peer countries, without much better outcomes. Many scholars and policymakers have looked at this state of affairs and dreamed big. Maybe there’s some broad fix — high deductibles, improvements in end-of-life care, a single-payer system — that can make United States health care less expensive. But what if the most workable answer isn’t something big, but hosts of small tweaks? A group of about a dozen health economists has begun trying to identify policy adjustments, sometimes in tiny slices of the health care system, that could produce savings worth around 1 percent of the country’s $3.3 trillion annual health spending. If you put together enough such fixes, the group points out, they could add up to something more substantial. (Margot Sanger-Katz, 8/27)

Throughout his presidential bid, Donald Trump promised not to cut Medicaid — a source of public health insurance for millions of people — including his own supporters. But the president became the most prominent booster of the congressional effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which included a virtual end to Medicaid as it has existed for over 50 years, despite the fact that the program covers over 70 million children and adults. (Sara Rosenbaum, 8/27)

The problems inherent in the American medical industry are well-known, but solutions are rarely applied, thanks to lobbyists and the politicians they support with their campaign dollars. It’s enough to make a person sick. (Cal Thomas, 8/27)