Fresh off the Democrats' midterm victory, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) has a lengthy wish list for the incoming Congress, starting with increasing the government's role in healthcare.

"As an immediate first step, Democrats must lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 down to 55, expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing, and guarantee universal health care coverage for every child from birth through age 19," Sanders said in a video posted to social media on Thursday. "All of this can be accomplished with 51 votes in the Senate through the reconciliation process."

"Healthcare must be considered as a human right, not a privilege. That means passing Medicare for All legislation, now supported by 66 percent of the American people," he continued.

It may seem easy to simply declare something a human right and decide that everyone must have universal access. But we do not need to look at imagined models created by academics to know what Sanders' dream of "Medicare for All" would look like. We need only to look across the pond.

The United Kingdom has a National Health Service (NHS), which is entirely "free" at the point of use. Despite its record levels of spending, Britain's waiting list for hospital treatment rose to 7.4 million people in August (the most recent month for which data are available) and the 18-week treatment target has not been met in more than a decade. For emergency care, almost 40 percent of patients wait longer than 4 hours. (Americans spend an average of 2.5 hours in the emergency room, Axios reported in April.)

These waits have deadly consequences. As Hyphen reports, 79,130 names were taken off the waiting list from September 2024 through August 2025—not because they were treated, but because they died before getting to the front of the queue. Just last month, a 59-year-old delivery driver died of a heart attack while waiting for surgery.

The NHS performs poorly on almost every available measure. Survival rates for the most common types of cancer rank near the bottom of European countries, and the U.K. has one of the lowest five-year survival rates for breast, cervical, colorectal, and lung cancers compared to high-income countries.

Although Britain has one of the most socialized healthcare systems in Europe, other countries also face the same supply issues. France spends 11.4 percent of GDP on healthcare—well above average for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—and yet 4.1 percent of people in France reported unmet healthcare needs, compared with an OECD average of 3.4 percent. Just 60 percent were satisfied with the availability of quality healthcare, below the OECD average of 64 percent (and considerably lower than the 75 percent reported in the United States).

Americans also face far lower waiting times. According to the OECD, 42 percent of Americans waited at least a month for a specialist appointment in 2023, compared to 62 percent in Britain and 65 percent in France.

These systems not only offer poor quality care; they cost taxpayers an enormous amount of money, straining public finances. Much of the world is suffering from a demographic crisis, in which there are more elderly people (who require more healthcare) than younger, working people. But these problems are exacerbated in European countries because of their enormous welfare states.

The recent violent protests in France—in which a 15-year-old boy had his hand blown off, historic buildings were set on fire, and a head teacher was doused in gasoline—are an extreme, though not unrealistic, example of what can happen when politicians make promises to spend more money the government does not have. European countries are saddled with debt, and yet the populace demands more.

America's healthcare system is far from perfect. Sanders is right to call it "dysfunctional" and "wildly expensive." But his plan to give the government—which, through Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs, is already responsible for 48 percent of U.S. healthcare spending—is misguided. The government is heavily involved here from a regulatory perspective too, including deciding what treatments are allowed, what drugs can be marketed, and what insurance plans must cover.

And Europe is no model for reform. If anything, it show how bad things can get when government has even more control over the healthcare system.

The post Bernie Sanders Wants To Use Democrats' Midterm Victory To Expand Medicare. Has He Looked at Europe? appeared first on Reason Magazine.