"The Landmine that Just Got Laid for Elizabeth Warren"

From PoliticoMagazine:

The moment came when the 10 participants were asked, by a show of hands, who would dispense entirely with private health insurance. Only New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Warren signaled “yes.”

That's when former Rep. John Delaney, one of the least visible of the 24 announced candidates, weighed in. After pushing back on the idea of taking something away from Americans that most are reasonably happy with, Delaney said this:

“Also it’s bad policy. If you go to every hospital in this country and you ask them one question, which is how would it have been for you last year if every one of your bills were paid at the Medicare rate? Every single hospital administrator said they would close. And the Medicare for All bill requires payments to stay at current Medicare rates. So to some extent we’re basically supporting a bill that will have every hospital closed.”

The writer reckons that the Republican candidate (i.e. Donald Trump) will repeat this endlessly during the next campaign - "Even Democrats admit that their plan will have every hospital closed."

The problem is that the claim is nonsense to start with.  Delaney is presumably in the pay of the US healthcare lobby, a massive rent-seeking enterprise, which charges about three or four times as much for treatment as the nationalised/regulated systems in Europe, and 'hospital administrators' are hardly going to admit they have been price gouging for decades, are they?

European healthcare works fine and there are plenty of hospitals, so assuming Medicare payments are at European levels, nothing terrible will happen. They'll just make normal profits and earn normal salaries instead of making super-profits and earning inflated salaries. Coverage will improve and the US economy will grow by ten or fifteen percent; the US healthcare lobby is currently soaking up about ten or fifteen per cent of US GDP in super-profits.

That said, trying to ban private health insurance is a daft idea and entirely unnecessary, as the European example shows. If you have private insurance, you get much the same treatment as under the default system, just at double or treble the cost. Which is why most people don't bother.