Remember the old saying “There is no free lunch”? It was a popular phrase when I was young.

According to Google AI:

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein popularized the acronym TANSTAAFL (“There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch”) in his 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. …

Milton Friedman heavily used the phrase as the title of his 1975 book to argue against government-subsidized programs, price controls, and free-spending policies.

However, both then and now, the left’s favorite tactic is to promise free lunches in various guises, and then fail to deliver them. The hope is that the voting public won’t catch on. Here’s an example:

Democratic Senate candidates Troy Jackson (Maine) and Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan) have renewed the push for Medicare for All, a signature feature of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign a decade ago. Now, as then, the issue has proven an effective vote-winner in Democratic primaries.

Among other things, “Medicare for All” makes use of the envy and anger of many in the younger generation towards the Boomers. They’ve got Medicare; why can’t we? However:

But the mechanics of Medicare for All proposals tend to be far less popular than the slogans. For instance, the Medicare for All Act, cosponsored by 117 House Democrats last year, would cap total revenues at each hospital as a core financing mechanism. Evidence from a unique policy experiment in Maryland shows that such revenue caps reduce the number of patients hospitals can treat, while making care costlier for those whom they do treat. …

Medicare for All advocates argue that private health insurance inevitably creates enormous inefficiencies. They claim that the government could save hundreds of billions of dollars every year by paying less for drugs, hospital care, and insurance administration. These savings could then fund a big expansion of benefits, broadening access to care and picking up costs that are currently borne out-of-pocket.

In reality, other developed countries deal with many of the same painful trade-offs between cost and access to care that Americans lament. The U.S. health-care system, for all its flaws, allows residents to obtain more cutting-edge medical procedures, without the long waiting lists found in other nations. And catastrophic out-of-pocket health-care costs in most European countries are similar to those found in America.

The article goes on to describe a Maryland policy from 2014 that did the following:

… allowed revenues at each hospital in the state and trusted those facilities to ration care for patients. This payment arrangement, known as “global budgeting,” drives much of the savings assumed by single-payer proposals and constitutes Section 611 of the Medicare for All Act.

Unfortunately, global budgeting has had the opposite of its intended effect in Maryland. With total revenues fixed, the state’s hospitals started treating fewer patients and charging more for each patient whom they did treat. Community hospitals have increasingly dumped seriously ill patients on the state’s once-prestigious academic medical centers, like Johns Hopkins, leaving these centers short of funds to deliver the most complex medical procedures. From 2012 to 2023, the state went from performing 61 percent more kidney transplants per capita than the nation to 40 percent fewer. Emergency department waiting times have surged to 153 percent of the national average, substantially higher than any other state. Because Maryland hospitals could maintain total revenues while delivering less care, the cost of common inpatient procedures rose 7 percent to 34 percent more than they did nationwide, depending on the procedure.

So, what do Americans think? They want Medicare for All as long as it’s a free lunch:

A recent poll found that Americans approved of Medicare for All in principle by a margin of 66 percent to 34 percent—but they opposed it, 64 percent to 35 percent, if it would increase their taxes, and by 76 percent to 24 percent if it delayed access to medical tests and treatments.

As I said, the left relies on many voters to remain ignorant of the nearly-inevitable negative consequences of Medicare for All.