Advertisement Democratic presidential candidate Buttigieg wants to move toward 'Medicare-for-all' South Bend, Indiana, mayor appears on ‘Conversation with the Candidate’ Share Shares Copy Link Copy

With an emotional recollection of the recent death of his father, potential presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg told Granite Staters during a televised town hall that the nation’s health care system needs to begin moving toward “Medicare-for-all.”Buttigieg, who appeared Thursday night on WMUR’s “Conversation with the Candidate” series, said the most difficult experience of his life was losing his father. But he said that thanks to the nation’s Medicare system, he and his family were able to focus on important end-of-life decisions without concern that his family would be financially ruined.Even as a mayor and a former military officer who served in Afghanistan, “Nothing could have prepared me for some of the end-of-life decisions that our family faced,” Buttigieg said. “One thing I learned was the closeness of our family,” he said. But he said, “In all of these painful decisions, what we had to worry about was what was medically right for our family. And we did not have to worry about money. Not because we’re wealthy. We’re not. But because people made a policy decision a long time ago about Medicare that when you reach a certain age, we will take care of this.”Now, as the 37-year-old Democrat is on a course toward a formal announcement of a run for the Democratic presidential nomination, one of his priorities is making health care and prescription drugs more accessible and affordable for all Americans.“The issue of the prescription drug crisis is alarming right now and puts lifesaving drugs out of reach for so many,” he said. “Part of the challenge has to do with the fact that the underlying costs are out of control.”He called for allowing the Medicare system to negotiate drug prices, which, he said, “is a policy that to me represents common sense.”“We want pharmaceutical companies that come up with lifesaving drugs of course to be motivated to continue to do so,” he said. “But sometimes you can tell just by some of these preposterous explosions in the costs of some drugs that it’s not about that. It’s simply about the profit motive.”Buttigieg said the overall cost of health care can be lowered “by having more readily available health care for all. We need a Medicare solution that moves us in a direction of 'Medicare-for-all' by allowing more people to get a more robust public option on the (Affordable Care Act) exchange.“That would help the out-of-pocket costs for these drug purchases come under control.”Buttigieg also proposed more federal spending on research and development to combat the Alzheimer’s disease crisis.“We also need to make sure that long-term care and memory care are better understood through our system,” he said. “Our current structure for health insurance and the way that health care is provided doesn’t really recognize that and doesn’t take into account the dimensions and the statistics on this issue.”Asked by an audience member how to lower the costs of Medicaid and Medicare, Buttigieg called for a health provider and payment system that focuses on the “whole patient,” rather than individual medical conditions.He said health care costs are driven “not by the cost of an actual procedure, but by the cost of bureaucracy.”“We’re one of the worst modern countries when it comes to the percentage of health care spending that is going into ‘administrativia’ and bureaucracy, rather than actual patient care.”He called for “unglamorous, under-the-hood-type work, like automating certain processes.”“We also should extend coverage more broadly because of the kind of rate-setting that can go on when more people are covered in what I would call a ‘Medicare-for-all-who-want-it’ scenario, which I think is the pathway to ‘Medicare-for-all’ as a public option. Then it will lead to a lower cost.”“We cannot underfund Medicaid,” Buttigieg said. “And if that means revenue, it that means looking at a wealth tax, or if it means a financial transaction tax or other ways to fund this, we have to do it because we have to regard health care as a right and not just something for some people.”