Bernie Sanders has vastly underestimated the cost of his single-payer health care plan, according to a new report.
Kenneth Thorpe, a health care expert at Emory University, concluded that the Sanders plan is underfunded by about $1.1 trillion a year, according to Vox.
Thorpe “concludes that single-payer at a national level would be significantly more expensive than the Sanders campaign believes, and would require workers to pay an additional 20 percent of their compensation in taxes. He also argues it would leave 71 percent of households with private insurance worse off once you take both tax increases and reduced health care expenditures into account,” Dylan Matthews writes.
The Sanders campaign calls the analysis a “total hatchet job,” as would be expected of a campaign in response to a critical report. Politicians tend to present an optimistic and rosy account of any proposal. Lyndon B. Johnson has the notorious honor of underestimating and obscuring the actual cost of Medicare when he pushed for its passage.
“There is something very wrong when the United States of America is the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care to all people as a right,” Sanders has said.
The Sanders camp expects to pay for a single-payer health care system through a combination of increased payroll taxes and income taxes, as well as large reductions in health care costs as a result of the new system.
Purported reductions in costs as a result of a single-payer system, however, isn’t so simple. Some European single-payer systems have lower costs, but it’s a result from lower costs overall rather than a successful reduction in costs. Assuming that a single-payer system can drive down costs on the level that the Sanders campaign expects has a lot of hope behind it, but less empirical evidence.
For Sanders’s “Medicare for All” plan to have full funding, he’d need to have steeper tax increases, stronger rationing of health care, or some other cost-cutting measure. Otherwise, it’d rely on larger amounts of debt.
