The Scrapbook has been secretly rooting for Bernie Sanders for a while now, because, well, he’s not Hillary Clinton. However, we are not without serious reservations about his candidacy. Many of his policy proposals reveal the rich fantasy life of the left, and not even the New York Times can conceal this fact. Sanders recently released more details on his single-payer health plan, and the paper of record found that his “Health Plan Is More of a Tax Plan.” Indeed, Sanders would create “a special income tax, called a premium, increase payroll taxes and raise a variety of taxes on high-income Americans, including income and capital gains taxes,” observes the Times.
Under Sanders’s plan, Americans wouldn’t have to pay (directly) for anything related to health care. No co-pays, deductibles, or any out-of-pocket costs. Oh, and Sanders’s plan would also pick up the tab for vision, dental, hearing, and long-term and palliative care. By some estimates, Sanders’s “free” health care plan would cost $28 trillion in additional federal spending over the next 10 years.
Sanders, of course, insists it would save money, but how it would he doesn’t say. “A lot of important details have been left out,” writes the Times. “Here are some things it doesn’t say: What would the new system pay doctors and hospitals for their services? How would it decide which medical treatments it should and shouldn’t cover? What strategies would it use to contain health care costs and keep the system affordable? Who would make the decisions, big and small, about how the program would work?”
The Times then sought clarification from Gerald Friedman, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who ran the numbers on the plan for the Sanders campaign. They asked him, among other things, how Sanders’s plan will supposedly lower the cost of physician services by almost 11 percent. Friedman’s response to the Times was, much like Sanders’s health care plan, priceless. “The pleasure of being an academic is I can just spell things out and leave the details to others,” he said. “The details very quickly get very messy.”
