Medicare for All Isn’t a Top Priority for Most Americans. Here’s What Is.

Plus, a final look at tax refunds for 2019

Medicare for All Isn’t a Top Priority for Most Americans. Here’s What Is.

Politicians and policy wonks may be busy debating the costs and benefits of Medicare for All, but Americans want lawmakers to prioritize some narrower reforms: bringing down prescription drug costs and preserving the Affordable Care Act’s protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions.

More than two-thirds of respondents in the Kaiser Family Foundation’s latest tracking poll said that “lowering prescription drugs costs for as many Americans as possible” should be a top health care priority. Similarly, 64% said that continuing the ACA’s protections for those with pre-existing conditions should be a top priority. Even among Republicans, 73% of whom say they want to see the Affordable Care Act overturned, 52% also say they want the law’s protections for pre-existing protections preserved.

By contrast, 31 percent said implementing a Medicare for All plan should be a top priority, while 27 percent said repealing and replacing the ACA should be. Those policy ideas draw fairly strong partisan support, though, with roughly half of Republicans (52%) saying Obamacare repeal should be a top priority (52 percent) and a similar share of Democrats (47%) calling Medicare for All a top priority.

Overall, 56% of Americans favor Medicare for All, which the poll explained would see people “get their insurance from a single government plan.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kaiser also found that the terminology used affects perceptions of a national health plan:

The tracking poll also finds that relatively few Americans want Congress to “decrease spending” on Medicare and Medicaid, with far larger shares of respondents saying they want to “increase spending” on those programs.

Americans also want lawmakers to tackle the issue of surprise medical bills, with majorities of both Democrats and Republicans saying that the federal government should protect patients from paying unexpected charges that arise when someone covered by insurance inadvertently receives care from an out-of-network provider.

Trump Administration Urges Quick Debt Ceiling Hike: Report

White House officials including Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney are pushing key GOP lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling quickly to avoid a dangerous fiscal cliff later in the year, The Washington Post’s Damian Paletta and Erica Werner report:

“The requests have taken on new urgency because other budget discussions with Capitol Hill have broken down, leaving policymakers at a loss for ways to avoid a pileup of dangerous deadlines in September that could impact the stock market, labor market and economic growth. …

“But the effort appears to be getting little traction so far, in part because some Democrats are insisting that any debt ceiling deal come as part of a package of changes that raises spending levels after October. The White House has sent mixed signals as to whether it would support raising spending caps, and Democrats have asked for firm commitments before they will proceed.”

Read more at The Washington Post.

GOP Tax Cuts Didn’t Change Average Refunds Much

Tax-filing season is officially over and IRS data released Wednesday show that in some key respects, tax returns and refunds this year looked a lot like tax returns and refunds last year, despite the big changes that took effect in 2018.

Here are some of the basic stats:

  • The average refund was $2,725, down 2% from $2,780 last year.
  • The refund total was $261 billion, down 1.7% from last year’s $265 billion (see the Wall Street Journal chart below).
  • The number of households receiving refunds rose slightly to 95,737,000, an increase of 303,000, with the percentage of households receiving refunds rising from 73.1% to 73.2%.
  • The number of returns filed increased by 0.2% on a year-over-over basis, to 137,233,000.

Some analysts expected that the total number of tax refunds would drop this year as some taxpayers failed to adjust their withholding levels, and complaints about smaller refund checks were widely discussed as tax-filing season kicked off at the beginning of the year. Last summer, the Treasury Department said that as many as 5 million fewer filers could receive refunds this year due to changes in the law, based on a Government Accountability Office report. But the data released this week show those concerns were overblown.

Although the overall numbers for the 2019 tax-filing season are very close to last year’s, there still could be meaningful differences at the household level that are, as The Wall Street Journal’s Richard Rubin put it, “canceling each other out.” The IRS data did not include information on median refund levels, for example, nor did it define which households were receiving refunds by income — important variables that may have changed significantly under the new tax rules.

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