Equipped with righteous outrage, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is again misrepresenting the research on his “Medicare for all” proposal. Sanders’ latest freak out comes in response to CNN’s Jake Tapper, who recently suggested that the senator’s Medicare math was unreliable.
2) Tapper says, “The study’s author says that that $2 trillion drop is not actually his conclusion. He says that’s based on assumptions by Senator Sanders.” Wrong. Provider payment rates in our plan are not assumptions, they are written into the bill…
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 20, 2018
A socialist, Sanders necessarily relies on economic fiction to present his policies as feasible.
Sanders confuses the studies’ assumptions for its conclusions. The study by Mercatus began with Sanders’s estimated reduction in total national healthcare spending (private sector and government), before arriving at the conclusion it would cost the federal government $32 trillion.
Sanders’ first problem is the political. There is no guarantee that the bill Sanders proposes would actually lead to the cost reductions he promises. None of us know what a final “Medicare for all” bill would look like if it ever made it to a final vote. Indeed, considering the striking divergence between the promised savings of the Affordable Care Act and what that law has meant in reality, it’s problematic to assume anything with confidence as to what Sanders’ bill would mean if ever enacted. Sorry, senator, you can’t just tweet aspirations about a bill and then claim that’s reality.
Then there’s the economic problem. As the Washington Examiner’s Phil Klein noted, Tapper’s point is well made.
. @jaketapper is actually right. And typical of a socialist to argue that because something is “written into the bill” that it represents how the market would behave in practice. No way you’re gonna get 40% below private payment rates w/out significant disruption https://t.co/3HupR5Qw9n
— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) August 20, 2018
Sanders tries to get around this truth by referencing a number of other articles by liberal writers. They claim that “Medicare for all” would reduce healthcare spending without affecting the quality of care. But all those articles rely on a very problematic foundation: their incompatibility with economic supply and demand interactions.
After all, we already know that free-at-point-of-use services lead to dramatic increases in healthcare consumption. Removing costs and thus the individual interest in personal responsibility, “Medicare for all” would lead to expensive spikes in things like emergency room visits and expensive but medically unnecessary tests. Moreover, whatever the level of resource cuts to providers that would occur under Sanders’ program, the existing Medicare system tells us that they would have to be significant to balance out. And that reduced reimbursement would likely mean reduced supply (Doctors retiring early) in an environment of increasing demand. What then?
I’ll tell you what then: it will inevitably lead to morally questionable decisions over care and to a significant slowdown in the research and development of new treatments.
Don’t misunderstand me, I recognize that we do not currently get value for money from our current healthcare system. Nevertheless, there are ways to reduce costs, improve service efficiency, and maintain the quality of care in a market-based system. For one example, we could do the opposite of “Medicare for all” and start taxing employer provided healthcare as an income benefit. That would inject a much needed dose of personal responsibility into healthcare consumption choices and push out over-priced providers.
But Sanders’s proposals would bankrupt the nation and lead to vastly higher taxes.
