The Lie Progressives Are Telling About Healthcare
While pushing to eliminate private insurance, they’ve missed one crucial point: Americans’ approval of their coverage.

Throughout the 2020 election, there has been a big rift in the Democratic Party regarding healthcare.
The progressives have begun pushing for Medicare for All, a proposal that would effectively eliminate private health insurance and cover everybody under a public option. The moderates, on the other hand, have advocated for introducing a public option available for anyone to switch to, but also want to keep private insurance.
I have already argued for why I agree with the latter side in this debate for practical reasons, but there’s another question that comes up here that hasn’t yet been addressed: the popularity of private insurance.
While defending private insurance, many moderate Democrats will say that there are over 200 million Americans that currently have private insurance, and it would be wrong to kick them off their plans that they’re content with.
The progressive rebuttal to this point is that, actually, no one likes private insurance, they really just like their doctors and hospitals. Medicare for All, they say, would cut out the unpleasant part of the healthcare system, and would give them the better option while letting them keep their doctors.
This seems like a reasonable point, and progressives have made a solid case for why private insurance is flawed: inflated hospital prices, increased accounting costs due to unnecessary bureaucracy, and insurance profiting off of a basic human need.
So far, moderates have not found a good response to this, but there’s quite a significant hole in this argument.
Whenever progressives argue that consumers don’t like private insurance, their evidence is almost purely anecdotal — they don’t know anyone who likes private insurance, therefore, no one likes it period.
What they never do is provide any stats to back it up, and there’s a reason why: there are none. As it turns out, Americans’ approval of private insurance is very high.
According to a 2017 poll by Gallup, 70% of people with private insurance rate their coverage as either excellent or good. That’s an overwhelming majority of people saying they’re satisfied with their current insurance, the insurance they would be kicked off if Medicare for All was implemented.
To be fair, 79% of Medicare and Medicaid recipients said they were satisfied with their coverage, meaning the approval of government insurance is nearly 10% higher than that of private insurance, but there’s still a vast majority of people who like their current insurance.
This calls into question a big point in the progressive campaign to abolish private insurance. It sort of makes sense to force everyone to switch to Medicare if they already hate their private insurance, as you’re improving their lives by relieving them of the financial burden in the healthcare system, and you’re getting rid of something they don’t like anyway.
However, that isn’t the case. If we were to implement Medicare for All and remove people from their private insurance, we would be getting rid of something they like all in the name of doing what’s good for them. That’s sometimes necessary, of course, and there’s a possibility it may be necessary now, but so far the evidence doesn’t suggest so.
The harms in simply having private insurance exist are minimal. While there are disadvantages to being on private insurance over a public option, offering people the choice to switch would mean they could leave private insurance if it was significantly harming them. Therefore, any of the problems with private insurance would be mitigated with the introduction of a public option.
On top of that, eliminating private insurance would be incredibly harmful. There would be many economic and societal ramifications to it, and when you look at the data, it’s also something that consumers don’t even want.
While private insurance may seem terrible, and in some ways it is, most people like their insurance, and currently there are no substantial reasons why the choice of insurance needs to be taken away.

