Health care is one of the rare policy areas where nearly everyone agrees something is wrong, but almost no one agrees on a specific solution. One alternative, used in many other countries, is a single-payer system, where the government pays providers for healthcare services. Medicare-for-all, which we described in a previous brief, is one version of single-payer, but as we show here, there are many other ways to implement this system.

The United States has a federal form of government, meaning that the power to make policy is shared between the national government in Washington and the 50 state governments located across the country.

Healthcare is an issue that affects every American. Even so, Americans disagree on issues such as whether access to health care is a right and how much the government should intervene in health care markets. One important issue in health policy is the implications of a single-payer system, in which the federal government would play a central role in providing healthcare to all Americans. This brief considers one example of a single-payer system, the so-called Medicare for All.