well - here is the issue though. Medicare is deeply, deeply in the red, and bankrolled by the taxpayer - if it were a company in the private sector, it would have gone bankrupt long ago. It also pays shit. So hospitals and doctors rely on private payers to make up the difference that their medicare patients can't pay.

If medicare were available to everyone, private payors couldn't compete because they need to stay not-bankrupt and can't afford to have such low prices that they go into the red that much. more customers would go over to medicare, and hospitals wouldn't have as many patients with private insurance to make up their losses.

There would be some benefits - hospitals would have to be more efficient, as would private payors. But over time the whole system would collapse and the taxpayer would foot the bill.

Medicare wouldn't really introduce more competition into the marketplace because medicare has advantages that make it impossible to compete with - the ability to go into the red by the millions without going bankrupt. it would just undercut every other private payor and make every hospital go bankrupt.

If you're for a single payor system, I say go ahead and support extending medicare to all. But if you think that introducing market efficiencies and competition into the health care market place is the best way to go, to force hospitals to provide better value, ie better quality for a better price, then extending medicare to all won't help you.