Democrats’ “Medicare for All” Pitch Depends on Ignorance

A new poll has once again shown that growing support for socialist policies is largely driven by ignorance about what left-wing slogans actually mean – and the existential threat they pose to the American way of life.

According to a survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) of 1,328 U.S. adults taken from September 16-21, an eye-popping 66 percent of respondents said they support “Medicare for All” – the highest level of support KFF has ever measured for the proposal. In 2020, a similar KFF poll found just 53 percent support.

In light of this finding, it’s unsurprising that more and more Democrats have officially thrown their support behind Medicare for All, a position that was once confined to far-left liberal figures like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now, Medicare for All has become a rallying cry for candidates from Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed to Virginia Senator Mark Warner, once considered one of the more moderate members of the Democrat caucus.

However, that topline figure is not all that the KFF poll found. The initial question described Medicare for All as a national health plan “in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan.” On that question, 84 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents, and 34 percent of Republicans registered support for the proposal.

But when respondents were told that Medicare for All could cause delays in medical tests and treatments, opposition more than doubled from 34 percent to 76 percent. When they were told that it could require higher taxes or threaten the current Medicare program, opposition rose to 64 percent and 61 percent, respectively.

What these results suggest is that many Americans are simply ignorant of what nice-sounding Democrat slogans like “Medicare for All” would actually mean. Canada provides a useful example.

In 2025, the median wait from a general practitioner’s referral to specialist treatment in Canada stretched to 28.6 weeks, according to the Fraser Institute. At the same time, Canada’s health-data agency reported that 5.7 million adults lacked a regular healthcare provider, while 74 percent of Canadians said they could not get a same- or next-day appointment when they needed one. CIHI has also found that one in ten patients who needed to be admitted to a hospital spent nearly two days or more stuck in the emergency room waiting for a bed.

And this is not a bargain-basement system starved for money. According to the OECD, Canada spends about $7,301 per person on healthcare, yet has just 2.7 practicing physicians per 1,000 people, far below the OECD average of 3.9.

That is the reality advocates of “Medicare for All” are trying to hide. Government can promise everyone coverage on paper, but it cannot magically create more doctors, hospital beds, specialists, or operating-room capacity. In Canada, the result has been a system where care is technically “free,” but access is severely limited – sometimes to the point where patients face life-threatening complications or even death.

Americans are justified in being frustrated about exorbitant healthcare and insurance costs. From 1999 to 2024, family health insurance premiums grew roughly three times faster than worker earnings. From 2000 to 2025, hospital services got 281 percent more expensive and medical care services got 147 percent more expensive, far higher than cumulative inflation of 92.6 percent.

But Medicare for All only doubles down on the strategy that broke the system in the first place – government meddling in the healthcare industry, namely through Obamacare. As the Paragon Health Institute notes, Obamacare’s regulations, “which primarily affected the individual market, led premiums to increase an average of 47 percent from 2013 to 2014 (the year the law was implemented).”

In other words, “socialism lite” is what created the country’s healthcare mess in the first place. Now, Democrats want Americans to believe that full-scale socialism will somehow make things better.

Obamacare was the first step toward socialized healthcare and “Medicare for All.” It was never intended to make anything cheaper. It was intended to break the healthcare and insurance incentive structures so completely that the public would clamor for a single-payer system because of the resultant rise in costs. That strategy, unfortunately, is working to perfection.

The sad truth is that most Americans are simply ignorant of this reality and ignorant of what “Medicare for All” actually looks like. Just like Obama’s infamous “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” lie, Democrats are fibbing again about the implications of moving to a single-payer system. When Americans learn the truth – and the fact that Medicare for All will increase wait times and raise taxes is the truth – they reject the policy outright.

It’s a similar story with socialist policies writ large. Simply promising that the government will provide “free” housing, education, and healthcare to everyone is an enticing prospect to millions of Americans, primarily young people, who don’t remember the result of those same empty promises made by every 20th-century communist dictator. Schoolkids are taught that capitalism is evil while activist-minded educators leave out that communism killed roughly one million people per year on average from 1917 to 2017.

Socialism preys on ignorance – of history, of economics, and of the gulf between what government promises and what it can deliver. Socialism’s appeal depends on Americans hearing the promise of “free” services without asking who pays, who decides, or what happens when those promises fail.

The best defense is an informed public willing to ask those questions and learn from the tragedies of the past. Until then, the same old failed ideas will keep winning support under new slogans.