INDIANOLA, Iowa — Rep. Ilhan Omar, speaking at an event for Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday, made the shockingly dishonest claim that siphoning away just $20 billion from the defense budget would allow the federal government to provide health coverage for “every single uninsured American.”
The real number is not isn’t even close.
In a speech warming up the crowd for Sanders, Omar explained, “I believe, like Bernie, our foreign policy is domestic policy. We currently spend $700 billion in funding endless wars, and wasteful Pentagon spending, which is more than half of all discretionary spending. Do you know what we can do, if we invested some of that money here at home? Let’s just take $20 billion of that money. We could provide healthcare for every single uninsured American.”
Let’s put aside for a moment that the entire defense budget doesn’t simply go to waste and actively fighting wars Sanders would want to end. And we’ll overlook the fact that defense is less than one-sixth of the overall budget, given that focusing on discretionary spending leaves out Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other entitlements. Let’s even put aside the fact that the health insurance plan Sanders is actually proposing would increase federal spending by $34 trillion over a decade — or an average annual cost of 170 times what Omar claimed.
To be as fair as possible to Omar, let’s say she wasn’t talking about the cost of the Sanders plan, but merely the annual cost of providing coverage to those who are currently uninsured. And let’s assume that when she said for “every single uninsured American,” she did not mean immigrants who are in the country illegally (a population Sanders has also said his plan would cover).
It just so happens that the liberal Urban Institute did an analysis of a range of eight different plans to expand insurance coverage, ranging from incremental to Sanders’ far-reaching approach. The cheapest option for covering the uninsured would still increase annual federal spending by $122.1 billion, or about six times what Omar claimed. This option would still leave uninsured 6.6 million immigrants who are in the country illegally.
Omar is trying to exploit liberal misconceptions about spending to make it seem that the United States is wasting a disproportionate amount of money on the military and that if we only shifted our priorities, just a small amount of that money could be used to address all sorts of domestic ills.
The only thing that can be said in Omar’s defense is that her claim is less outrageous than the one made by her squad-mate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who once claimed that two-thirds of the cost of “Medicare for all” could be financed with $21 trillion in Pentagon fraud.
