Sen. Bernie Sanders has emerged as a legitimate threat to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Recent polling has shown him either leading or in second place in Iowa and New Hampshire, and, nationally, he trails only Joe Biden. As one of the three likeliest people to be the next president, Sanders should no longer be laughed off as a silly old socialist. His dangerous policies should be taken seriously.
A closer examination of Sanders’s statements during Tuesday night’s debate reveals the deep dishonesty with which he argues for his signature piece of legislation: Medicare for All. Under his proposal, the government would kick everyone off their existing insurance and transition them to a government-run plan within four years. The new plan, he promises, would provide extensive benefits — these include medical, dental, and vision coverage — without any premiums, deductibles, or copayments.
Pressed on the costs of this vision for free healthcare, Sanders avoided offering specifics but instead insisted that his vision for free healthcare “will cost substantially less than the status quo.” He argued that it would save money “because we take on the greed and the profiteering and the administrative nightmare that currently exists in our dysfunctional system.”
Yet the liberal Urban Institute took into account the potential administrative savings from having a single government insurer and estimated that the sweeping proposal would drive total U.S. healthcare spending to $59 trillion over the coming decade, or $7 trillion greater than the status quo projections. The study concluded that “the increase in spending for people with this new generous coverage would outweigh the savings from lower prices for healthcare providers and lower administrative costs.” In other words, give people free coverage and they’ll spend a lot more on medical services than the system will save from streamlined paperwork or squeezing doctors’ salaries.
Implementing the plan would require $34 trillion in additional federal spending over the next decade, according to the same analysis. To put that into perspective, that represents more than double the revenues currently projected to be generated by all corporate and individual income taxes combined. In the debate, Sanders said, “One of the provisions we have to pay for it is a 4% tax on income, exempting the first $29,000.” Yet, according to a white paper released by Sanders himself, that tax would raise $3.5 trillion over a decade, or just about enough to pay for one year of his healthcare plan.
The Sanders argument is that, for most families, the increased taxes would be more than offset by the savings that will result from being able to forgo premiums and deductibles. Yet Emory University health finance expert Kenneth Thorpe looked at an earlier version of the Sanders plan and found that “71% of households with private insurance today would pay more in new taxes than they would save through the elimination of premiums and cost sharing.”
At another point in the debate, Sanders was asked about the 1.5 million health insurance industry workers who would stand to lose their jobs in the rapid transition to socialized coverage. “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,” he said.
This is more deception by Sanders. Though there is a temporary transitional assistance provision in his bill, it would only go into effect once the new healthcare benefits become available. But that isn’t until four years after the enactment of the legislation. Since insurance companies would no doubt begin laying off workers after Congress votes to put them out of business, and well before the end of the four-year period, the temporary help would be of limited benefit.
Furthermore, the bill limits spending on this assistance to 1% of the annual budget of the program. Assuming that translates into $34 billion a year and that all of the money is plowed into cash payments, as opposed to job training, it would mean less than $24,000 per displaced worker, hardly the “up to five years income and healthcare and job training” that Sanders claimed. In fact, at an average of under $12 per hour, it wouldn’t even provide the $15-an-hour income that Sanders has claimed is the minimum “living wage.”
Sanders has escaped real media scrutiny of his statements because he has never been viewed as a real threat to win the nomination or capture the White House. Now that he’s a real contender, it’s time he gets held to the same standard as other candidates.
