More than 100 House Democrats have endorsed a “Medicare for all” plan which would eradicate private health insurance, and every single senator running for president, with the sole exception of Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, has backed single-payer. So the Congressional Budget Office put it to the test, and needless to say, it’s not pretty.
Every American who sits even a centimeter and a half to the left of Paul Krugman understands that the cost component of “Medicare for all” renders it immediately untenable. In the arguably most comprehensive valuation of the bill as proposed by 2020 hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the Mercatus Center conservatively estimated that the bill would cost $32.6 trillion in its first decade. That would roughly double our federal spending, and so far, not one Democrat has announced a tax or a combination of taxes that would remotely fund it. The tax touted by a Democrat that would accrue the most revenue is the wealth tax proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., which would generate $2.75 trillion over ten years, less than one tenth the cost of “Medicare for all.”
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