Many politicians, interest groups, and commentators contend that the COVID-19 pandemic shows that the United States desperately needs Medicare for All. It is certainly true that the American health care system has no shortage of pathologies and needs a complete overhaul. However, as Cato adjunct scholars Charles Silver and David A. Hyman explain, Medicare for All is not the reform we need. Fundamentally, the response to COVID-19 has been a spectacular case of government failure. In this issue of Pandemics and Policy, the primary lesson of the pandemic is that putting the federal government in charge of the health care system saddles it with administrative responsibilities that it could not possibly handle.

A hallmark of the Trump administration has been its creation of significant administrative programs on the fly, based on ambiguous or implied textual authorities, and without any public input. While such action is not unprecedented, the current administration has broken new ground with the number, size, and scope of these programs. A new paper from Cato scholar William Yeatman discusses four such initiatives involving almost $40 billion in benefits and dispensations from more than $400 billion in tariffs.