Why Medicare for All Would Damage our Republic by Jay Cost at National Review

This is a very diverse array of policies, but they all exhibit a similar flaw. When the government wishes to accomplish some public purpose that it does not have the means to do itself, it contracts with private parties to accomplish the end. In exchange, the state promises, in effect, to guarantee the private parties a profit from the arrangement. The interest groups gladly accept and then use their public bounties to build a political power base, ensuring that their ends are secured, even if they are not in the public interest.

What Sanders and the left wing of the Democratic party aim to do is to top all these previous endeavors — committing to pour trillions of dollars into the medical-services industry for the sake of public health. They assure us that the government will be able, under such an arrangement, to negotiate a better deal for the taxpayer. But this assurance only demonstrates that they do not understand how our government functions in practice. History has shown that precisely the opposite has happened, again and again. Factions that are blessed by the government come to dominate it, to the detriment of the general welfare.

“Medicare for all” would be like creating a fearsome new Pretorian Guard. These elite soldiers were tasked with protecting the life of the Roman emperor, but their rarefied position gave them extraordinary influence over the affairs of state, to the extent that they sometimes assassinated emperors they opposed and set up new ones more to their liking. If the federal government commits to giving trillions to the medical-services industry to protect the lives of the American people, expect that industry to wield dangerously inflated influence. And it would be dreadful for the republican quality of our system.

HKO

The American Government is more prone to this government creation of special interest conflict because of the institutionalization of influence by way of lobbying.  Make a private interest dependent on the government and then make the government dependent on the interest they enabled; what could go wrong.

I recommend you read the entire piece. It explains a concern missing from the debate.

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