Weekly Writers Round-Up: Medicare-for-All’s Threat to Hospitals, an Accidental School Choice Ally, and the Pension System’s Burden on Taxpayers

Each week, we’ll be featuring opinion pieces from the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. Do you dream of having bylines like these? See here for info on how we can help make that a reality.

Bernie’s Medicare-for-All Would Threaten Catholic Hospitals by Elise Amez-Droz (Summer 2019) in The American Conservative
During Tuesday’s Democratic debate, Senator Bernie Sanders declared that his Medicare for All (M4A) Act could solve America’s healthcare crisis. Co-authored by other Democratic presidential candidates, including Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker, the bill demonstrates that the idea of universal healthcare is a popular one. But if enacted, it would do a great deal of harm, possibly depriving one in seven patients of the healthcare they currently receive.

Healthcare and health insurance are sometimes used as synonyms, yet they’re vastly different concepts. Healthcare means the goods and services provided to a patient by medical professionals. Health insurance is a means of payment for those goods and services. M4A would take care of the latter. But it’s the former that presents a big problem for M4A supporters…

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Accidentally Makes the Case for School Choice by Christian Barnard (Spring 2019) in Reason
At a Bernie Sanders campaign rally last weekend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) inadvertently made a powerful case for educational freedom.

The young congresswoman shared a childhood story about how her family made financial sacrifices to leave the Bronx and buy a house in Westchester so that she could attend school in a higher quality district. “My family made a really hard decision,” she remarked as she lamented the inequities of the school system. “That’s when I got my first taste of a country who allows their kids’ destiny to be determined by the zip code they are born in…”

Low returns for public pensions threaten future retirees by Jen Sidorova (Spring 2019) in MarketWatch
As the fiscal year ends and pension plans look at their annual investment returns, one thing becomes clear — these returns have seen better days.

For taxpayers, this opens the possibility of their tax dollars being diverted to pay for pensions debt instead of schools, roads and hospitals in their communities. High pension returns of prior years might suggest hope for future market recovery, but a deeper analysis reveals that these low returns are perhaps the new normal. If states and municipalities don’t lower their expectations regarding asset gains, future retirees could be out of luck — and taxpayers would still be on the hook for accumulated debt…