Bernie Sanders swears that in his pursuit to criminalize the private insurance industry, his Medicare For All Act would still offer five years of financial security for the 1.5 million people left without their private industry jobs.
“We build into our ‘Medicare for all’ program a transition fund of many, many billions of dollars that will provide for up to five years income and healthcare and job training for those people,” the Vermont senator promised during the January presidential debate.
It should not come as any surprise, but the available math indicates that this is untrue.
Bernie’s bill states that former health insurance workers will be eligible for temporary assistance for up to five years. But the temporary worker assistance fund doesn’t become available until the Medicare For All Act’s benefits become available, which would be four years after the bill is enacted. This means that unemployed former healthcare workers wouldn’t receive a dime from the fund intended to insulate them from the bill’s consequences until more than four years after Bernie kicked them out of their jobs.
Furthermore, the Medicare For All Act only allocates up to 1% of its budget to the temporary worker assistance fund. That means that, at maximum, workers get 1% of $3.4 trillion per year, or $34 billion per year. That means that even giving leeway to Sanders, the average worker would receive at best $22,666.67 annually. Assuming every dollar of that went to a paycheck (and not job training), the Medicare For All Act would pay former health insurance workers a mere $11.33 per hour.
That’s a far cry from $15-an-hour minimum wage Bernie has called a “human right.” Anything less than that, Bernie has argued, does not constitute a “living wage.”
And again, this unrealistically conservative estimate assumes that the estimated $34 trillion price tag successfully funds everything from teeth cleaning to cancer surgery without going over the budgets of each of the bill’s sections.
Bernie will fight for $15 to punish mom and pop shops, but when it comes to the victims of his socialist agenda, he’ll surely leave workers out to dry.
