Bernie Sanders's $18 trillion in proposed spending is more affordable than it sounds

[maxparrish]

We have been through this before. Medical costs have been driven up in the US over the last forty years as the health care industry has been slowly converted into for profit businesses. There is no indication that any of the presidential candidates other than Sanders wants to reverse this. The Republicans have all pledged to repeal the ACA, which surprisingly has achieved some cost containment at the same time that it has subsidized the grossly inefficient private health care insurance companies.

I love folks made-up truthies, spilling from the 'insta knowledge' pipeline.

First, I have read several studies on the increasing cost of health care. There are several reasons that have been advanced as likely...among them: the increased cost of technology, the untaxed benefit of employer health plans, the increased use of third party insurance, and the massive increase in federal spending as a fraction of all healthcare spending. However, I have yet to read a study that says that the massive increase in health care cost is primarily due to your unproven claim that it is because the industry has been converted to for profit business (or are we to assume the once prevalent dominance of nothing but independent practitioners were charities?). I suspect you just made it up because its sounded good to your bias.

Second, there is no evidence of cost containment from ACA, there are theoretical reasons and evidence for cost increases.

Third, the claim that private health insurance companies are being subsidized is plausible, given the program's dubious structure. But if so, there is no evidence that it is due to 'grossly inefficient' providers - in fact it is a counterfactual that would imply that cost containment have failed.

The Wall Street Journal says that Sander's Medicare for all will cost 15 trillion dollars over ten years, and will save 20 trillion dollars in spending by the private sector. I think that this is overly optimistic. But even if Medicare for all just broke even we would be ahead. The study that the Wall Street Journal quoted also said that Sander's Medicare for all plan would insure everyone in the country, and would be able to provide more services and or lower copays than the ACA.

More rubbish. I read the WSJournal article. Do you just make this stuff up? It said nothing about Sander's Medicare saving 20 trillion dollars in spending by the private sector, not did they endorse any of the claimed 'savings' in the study of a similar plan in 2013.

Here is what the WSJ actually said of Sanders:

To pay for it (the 18 Trillion Dollar Dream), Mr. Sanders, a Vermont independent running for the Democratic nomination, has so far detailed tax increases that could bring in as much as $6.5 trillion over 10 years, according to his staff.

A campaign aide said additional tax proposals would be offered to offset the cost of some, and possibly all, of his health program. A Democratic proposal for such a “single-payer” health plan, now in Congress, would be funded in part through a new payroll tax on employers and workers...

Mr. Sanders hasn’t released a detailed plan, but a similar proposal in Congress, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.), would require $15 trillion in federal spending over 10 years, on top of existing federal health spending, according to an analysis of the plan by Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Mr. Conyers’s office referred questions about the plan to Mr. Friedman.

Mr. Gunnels, the Sanders aide, said the campaign hasn’t worked out all details on his plan—for instance, his version might allow each state to run its own single-payer system. But he said the $15 trillion figure was a fair estimate. ...

The Conyers plan (of 2013), for instance, assumes significant savings by allowing the government to negotiate for prescription-drug prices, and it would rely on the new payroll taxes for funding.

So far, the tax increases Mr. Sanders has proposed are concentrated on Americans earning at least $250,000 a year and on corporations. They include increases in the capital-gains tax, the estate tax and personal income-tax rates for the wealthiest Americans. He also would impose a fee on financial transactions, with investment companies taxed on every stock they trade.

Jared Bernstein, an economist at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and would transform the U.S. into an economy much more like those in Europe, with a significantly larger share of economic activity in government hands. “It’s not the model we employ [in the U.S.], but it is a viable economic model,” he said. Still, he cautioned the revenue would have to come from the middle class as well as the wealthy.

More-centrist Democrats think it is a bad idea. “We are not a country that has limitless resources. You need to tamp on the brakes somewhere, but he doesn’t,” said Jim Kessler, senior vice president for policy at the Democratic think tank Third Way. “There’s no such thing as free college; somebody is going to be paying for it.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/price-t...osals-18-trillion-1442271511#livefyre-comment

As Sanders has yet to be precise on his "plan", at this point it is somewhat a matter of guesswork.

Finally, note that the medicare "study" was a position paper produced for the activist group "Physicians for a National Health Program" (a single payer advocacy group). There are a number of dubious and misleading claims in this paper, but that deserves a separate treatment.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/ph...474049098533/1073054849373777/?type=1&fref=nf

1) Bernie’s proposals would cost less than what we’d spend without them. Most of the “cost” the Journal comes up with—$15 trillion—would pay for opening Medicare to everyone. This would be cheaper than relying on our current system of for-profit private health insurers that charge you and me huge administrative costs, advertising, marketing, bloated executive salaries, and high pharmaceutical prices. (Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, estimates a Medicare-for-all system would actually save all of us $10 trillion over 10 years).

(2) The savings from Medicare-for-all would more than cover the costs of the rest of Bernie’s agenda—tuition-free education at public colleges, expanded Social Security benefits, improved infrastructure, and a fund to help cover paid family leave – and still leave us $2 trillion to cut federal deficits for the next ten years.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/ph...474049098533/1073054849373777/?type=1&fref=nf

1) Bernie’s proposals would cost less than what we’d spend without them. Most of the “cost” the Journal comes up with—$15 trillion—would pay for opening Medicare to everyone. This would be cheaper than relying on our current system of for-profit private health insurers that charge you and me huge administrative costs, advertising, marketing, bloated executive salaries, and high pharmaceutical prices. (Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, estimates a Medicare-for-all system would actually save all of us $10 trillion over 10 years).

(2) The savings from Medicare-for-all would more than cover the costs of the rest of Bernie’s agenda—tuition-free education at public colleges, expanded Social Security benefits, improved infrastructure, and a fund to help cover paid family leave – and still leave us $2 trillion to cut federal deficits for the next ten years.

Medicare is pretty crappy coverage.

 

[ZiprHead]

It's great as a basic starter package for all.

 

[Valjean]

Robert Reich has weighed in on the Journal article: http://robertreich.org/post/129306966350