Guaranteeing high quality health care at a cost that does not break the piggy bank is one of the great challenges confronting policymakers today. Everyone wants access to the best possible health care at the best possible prices. Obamacare was supposed to help. It did not. Now, an even more harmful idea is making the rounds among many politicians, Medicare for All.

The costs of implementing this system—if anyone can determine how the system is to work in the first place—will be astronomical, and is why advocates for the idea should level with the public about costs.

This program, popularized by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, is a single-payer health care system, with taxpayers on the hook for costs. Already, several states, including Sen. Sanders’ own Vermont, and California, have attempted such endeavors and have found that the easy promises and talking points fade into irrelevance when confronted with fiscal reality.

The projected state price tag for Vermont, with a population of only 620,000 people, is around $2.6 billion. California’s costs are much higher and are estimated to be around $400 billion, of which $50 to $100 billion will be new spending. This would require either a massive tax increase or major reductions to other state services such as education.

The cost for a national program would naturally be exponentially larger. Sen. Sanders himself estimated a 10-year cost of $13.8 trillion (yes with a “T”)! Other analyses found that to be a lowball estimate, with the Urban Institute (hardly a conservative organization) estimating an eye-popping increase of $32 trillion in federal spending requiring ever more debt, tax increases, or cuts to other necessary programs.

Costs are not the only problem. By putting spending control in the hands of government bureaucrats, the program fails to allow consumers to look for the best services they and their family need. Just as bad, once the cost becomes too much, Medicare for All will lead to lower quality of care while stifling innovation.

Supporters of this tax-payer funded system should explain how they will pay for the program while not diminishing people’s health care coverage and services, and how they will avoid stunting the innovation Americans expect in the health care marketplace. If they can’t explain this, then they are merely playing to the political crowd and not offering real solutions to real challenges.

A better solution is to look to the states and focus on increasing access to a larger number of health care providers that will help connect people to care while also driving down costs. There are many ways this can be achieved.

• Including different health care practitioners, such as nurses, to expand the care they are allowed to provide patients.
• Expand telemedicine to help improve outcomes by getting treatment to people quicker and at a lower cost
• Increase the use of charity care to treat economically disadvantaged people without thrusting them into a government run program.
• Embrace health care price transparency, that has been attempted (and stymied by special interests) in Ohio, which would tell consumers the real costs of the procedures they are considering. This would create a demand for better services at better prices.
• Adopt patent reforms that will facilitate a speedier path to market for high-quality, less expensive, generic drugs.

The bottom line is there are better ways to help Ohioans, and all Americans, get the health care they need and deserve without imposing a one-size fits all, Washington, DC run program. Policymakers need to focus on finding real solutions, not making easy promises that will put us deeper in debt and trap people in a system of low-quality health care.

Greg R. Lawson is the research fellow at The Buckeye Institute.