Posted by Tina
The American Spectator reveals findings by the left leaning Urban Institute that says Bernie’s single-payer healthcare plan cannot be sustained. Bernie contends that his plan will save $6 trillion over ten years. The UI says ,”In total, federal spending would increase by about $2.5 trillion (257.6 percent) in 2017. Federal expenditures would increase by about $32.0 trillion (232.7 percent) between 2017 and 2026.” That doesn’t include a $6.6 trillion increase in healthcare expenditures nationally. See the report here.
The report has receive blow back from radical left agitators for single payer, as revealed by The American Spectator:
Despite a long history of advocating progressive government programs, UI has been the target of numerous denunciations for the thought crime of questioning the viability of Medicare for All. The most belligerent appeared in the Huffington Post, where single-payer zealots Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein castigated UI for its “ridiculous” report. These particular critics are the co-founders of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) which has agitated for single payer health care since 1987.
It’s deliciously ironic that Woolhandler and Himmelstein condemn the authors of the UI study as “biased.” They and their organization are notorious for publishing hopelessly tendentious “research.” One of their most preposterous efforts was a 2009 study that made the following assertion: “Lack of health insurance is associated with as many as 44,789 deaths per year in the United States.” This claim was widely panned at the time by health policy experts, including John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, who debunked PNHP’s methodology at the Health Affairs blog.
The ACA (Obamacare) was sold on a pack of lies about the cost as well as the improvements in coverage. It has failed on both of these promises and much much more. The last thing we need is a plan that compounds the expensive, regulation entangled mess.
Only problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
Just ask the folks in Venezuela how Chavez & Maduro’s socialism is doing . . . . .
As this is the second Google result for “medicare for all unsustainable”, I just want to point out that, if you actually read the report, literally the next sentence after the ones quoted here is, “The increase in federal spending is so large because the federal government would absorb a substantial amount of current spending by state and local governments, employers, and households.”
This means that there will not be an increase of $32 trillion in overall spending, as one might be led to believe by this post. It means that the main reason this number is so large is that spending would be shifted from the states to the federal level. This number is useless for representing the actual overall cost increase, if any.
Furthermore, at no point does the report make any definitive statement about the sustainability of the overall model.
Thank you for taking the time to express your opinion at Post Scripts, grmpf.
There’s a problem with your argument, well several actually, but I’ll stick to just one unless you choose to engage further.
You wrote, “…spending would be shifted from the states to the federal level.”
The federal and state governments are the taxpayers so in one respect it represents a shift. But taxpayers will end up spending more because a universal healthcare plan destroys competition and incentive for innovation. The cost for medicine began to grow after medicare was passed. When people are given things they don’t concern themselves with cost, nor do the providers when they know “the government” will pay, until it becomes unsustainable.
Medicare and Social Security are the main drivers of the massive debt we’ve accumulated. They now cost taxpayers much more than was projected when the plans were conceived and it’s still it’s not enough. In 1965 when Medicare was passed, “official government projections foresaw hospital spending – the program’s largest component – reaching only $9 billion in 1990. Actual Medicare spending on hospital care in that year was $66 billion, or over seven times as high. One result is that Medicare’s payroll tax is now nearly double what its sponsors said would be necessary.”
But let’s try a little common sense. If you wanted to buy a toaster but the only way you could buy it was through a third party with a massive bureaucracy and a penchant for writing regulations, it would cost a lot more than if you could buy it at a store that had to compete for your business. Your toaster would have the added expense of the middle man, the government bureaucracy. Why would you do that?
Everything the government does ends up costing more than they think/say it will.
June 2018, Market Watch, “Opinion: The financial hole for Social Security and Medicare is even deeper than the experts say”
We should get the government out of the healthcare industry completely. Then, just as the cost to consumers for flat screen TV’s has come down dramatically in a short time, so would the costs for healthcare.
We will always have a need for charitable hospital and doctor care for the truly poor. It’s easier to cover the needy when we don’t treat everyone as if they were indigent.