Bernie Sanders argued Monday that a new study that estimated a daunting $32 trillion-over-a-decade price tag for his “Medicare for all” actually makes the case for it.
The Vermont senator and former Democratic presidential candidate said in a video posted late Monday that the study from the right-of-center Mercatus Center, which gets funding from GOP megadonors Charles and David Koch, proves that an expansion of Medicare to every American would save money on administrative costs. However, Sanders does not acknowledge the key takeaway from the study: that such a system would cost $32.6 trillion over a decade and need major tax hikes to cover the gap.
“Let me thank the Koch brothers of all people for sponsoring a study that shows ‘Medicare for all’ would save the American people $2 trillion over a ten-year period,” Sanders said in a video posted on Twitter.
Thank you, Koch brothers, for accidentally making the case for Medicare for All! pic.twitter.com/speuEL6ETC
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 30, 2018
The study said the savings would come from lower administrative costs and lower drug prices under a government-run single-payer system, where private insurance is abolished and the federal government pays for healthcare.
“A ‘Medicare for all’ healthcare system would save the average family significant sums of money,” Sanders said. “It would do that by substantially reducing the administrative costs now taking place as a result of the billing, bureaucracy and insatiable greed of the insurance industry.”
Mercatus said that there are a lot of unanswered questions surrounding “Medicare for all,” including covering the extra $32 trillion in federal budget commitments over the next decade.
“A doubling of all currently projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections would be insufficient to finance the added federal costs of the plan,” it said.
Sanders conceded in his video that “depending on income, an individual may pay a little bit more in taxes to finance ‘Medicare for all.’”
However, Sanders said those people would save “thousands of dollars each and every year because they will no longer be paying premiums, deductibles and copayments to the private, for-profit companies that run our healthcare system.”
Sanders also did not address a key question from Mercatus about how doctors and hospitals will respond to the shift to a “Medicare for all” system. Sanders’ bill introduced last fall seeks to pay doctors and hospitals under the same rate they get paid by Medicare, which pays them 40 percent less than private insurance.
