Her Premium Went From $700 to $1,300 a Month. Now She Wants Medicare for All.
Jaime Bardenhagen's message to Democrats after the midterms fits in 2 words: "Do something."
She is a former nurse in Leelanau County, up in the rural northwest corner of Michigan. She has Parkinson's and a rare genetic disease called sialidosis that can cause seizures. When the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expired, the premium she and her husband pay went from $700 a month to $1,300, with a $7,500 deductible stacked behind it. So they started putting off the tests her doctor wanted. "We couldn't afford that," she told Kate Wells of KFF Health News.
She grew up on a farm believing you work for what you need. She says she feels a little guilty about getting coverage from the government. She supports Medicare for All anyway, and her reason is the most honest sentence in the whole debate. She felt the insurance companies, not the doctors, were calling the shots on which prescriptions and procedures patients could get. Wouldn't it be fairer, she figured, if "good people" in government made those calls?
She isn't alone. Kim Bogan has spent 15 years as an emergency room nurse at Sparrow Hospital in Lansing. Her patients arrive sicker than ever and can't afford the prescriptions they leave with. She spent the past year between 12-hour shifts campaigning for Abdul El-Sayed, who ran on Medicare for All and is now a senator-elect. Progressives ran on some version of it in Texas, Iowa, Maine, and Michigan, and the midterm wave handed Democrats a majority.
I take both of these women seriously. Their diagnosis is right. When a patient with Parkinson's skips her tests because of a deductible, the system failed her, and the failure has nothing to do with whether she voted red or blue.
It's the prescription I'd argue with.
Look closely at her complaint. Someone other than her doctor decides what she can have. Medicare for All answers that by changing the name of the someone. The claim is still there. The code is still there. The approval still comes from a desk the patient never sees, staffed by people paid to say no often enough to keep the budget whole. Michael Cannon, a Cato Institute economist who opposes the idea, put it bluntly in the same story: "Everyone knows that the industry is going to end up running the show, and that has been the case since they passed Medicare." You don't have to share his politics to recognize the exam room he's describing. Plenty of doctors already spend their afternoons fighting prior authorizations with Medicare Advantage plans.
Even the people who study this for a living expect the big version to stall. Jonathan Oberlander at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill said voters by and large didn't vote to have the government take over health insurance, and that a Democratic majority isn't a Medicare for All majority. A KFF poll found support drops when people hear the arguments about higher taxes and delays. The likelier wins are smaller: restoring the expired subsidies, reining in prior authorization. Both would help. Neither would put Bardenhagen's doctor back in charge of her care.
There's a version of this fix that doesn't need 60 votes. It's already running in thousands of small practices around the country, and it works the same whether the next president is a socialist or a libertarian.
Pay the primary care doctor directly. A flat monthly fee, often $50 to $100 for an adult, covers the visits, the texts, the follow-ups, and the time to think. No claim, no code, no one in a cubicle approving the blood draw. Labs run at close to wholesale, which in a lot of practices means a basic panel costs about what a lunch does. A patient like Bardenhagen gets a doctor who can watch the tremor, adjust the medicine, and order the test without asking anyone's permission, because there is no one to ask.
Then keep insurance for what insurance is built for: the seizure that lands you in the hospital, the surgery, the cancer. Public or private, that pooled money belongs on the rare, enormous bill. Running every refill and every lab through it is how a $7,500 deductible ends up standing between a nurse and her own tests.
El-Sayed says his plan would be a guaranteed government baseline, and "if you like your insurance from your employer or from your union, that can still be there for you." Fine. Whatever baseline Washington builds, primary care should sit outside the claims machine, paid for directly, with the doctor answering to the patient in front of her.
Do something, Bardenhagen said. Here's something that doesn't have to wait for 2028: find a doctor you can pay directly, and give the deductible one less thing to stand in front of.
Sources: Kate Wells, KFF Health News, "Midterm Wave Sets a Course for 'Medicare for All' Fight" (Nov. 6, 2026): kffhealthnews.org/insurance/medicare-for-all-single-payer-insurance-el-sayed-midterms-democratic-congress-voter-appeal/
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