How you know an article is a piece of fake-ass muckraking smear: (1) Author invokes the specter of WWII (2) Use of over-simplifying graphics (3) Piece leads with photo of its subject’s angryface. In her article about the cost of Bernie Sanders’s proposals, Laura Meckler checks all three of those boxes.
Meckler’s big argument: Bernie’s plan will cost $18 trillion over ten years, which, she says, would amount to “the largest peacetime expansion of government in modern American history.” Just to put that in context for you, she goes on: “As a share of the economy, that would represent a bigger increase in government spending than the New Deal or Great Society and is surpassed in modern history only by the World War II military buildup.“
Where does that $18 trillion figure come from? Let’s start with Meckler’s biggest assumed cost. She argues that Bernie’s plan to implement a single-payer health-care system—a system that would look a lot like Medicare for all—would cost $15 trillion over the course of ten years. She cites Gerald Friedman’s analysis of HR 676, a bill that proposes to implement a single-payer system—a bill that Sanders doesn’t necessarily support—to back up this claim.
But, in his analysis of HR 676, Friedman says he thinks the plan would actually save about $200 billion per year from the current estimated cost of $1.7 trillion annually. (Meckler says Bernie’s policy aide thinks that $15 trillion was a fair estimate, but that quote could be taken out of context.) The Daily Kos suspects Meckler gets the number by subtracting only part of the savings from switching to single-payer (the part that would eliminate lots of administrative costs, which ring up $2 trillion over the course of ten years) from the current cost of the heath-care system ($17 trillion over 10 years), which leaves a total of $15 trillion in costs for single-payer. You can read Friedman’s report here.
For some reason, she doesn’t include the $337 billion the United States would save per year on pharmaceuticals, which would come about due to the government’s increased bargaining power under a single-payer system. But even if she did include that number, she’d still be subtracting it from the cost of health care under the current, non-single payer system. In any case, she won’t respond to my efforts to reach out to her, so I’m not quite sure how she’s coming to that number.
Anyway, another analysis of the cost of our health-care system—this one done by a team researchers from UCSF, CUNY, and Harvard Medical—suggests that the United States would save $375 billion annually by switching to a single-payer system. That would mean savings of nearly $4 trillion over the course of 10 years, not an increase of $15 trillion over the same time period, as Meckler would have you believe.
But what about the cost of all those other, non-health-care costs? As Meckler says in her article, Bernie wants to spend almost $3 trillion to make Social Security solvent, to help young people of color find jobs, to fix our infrastructure, to fund paid leave for families, to make tuition free at public universities, and to secure pension funds. How’s he going to cover the cost? (Assuming that making college tuition free and helping people find jobs wouldn’t end up saving money in the long run, that is.)
By doing the things he says he wants to do. Those things include raising the marginal tax rate, closing loopholes in the code so that corporations can’t dodge taxes, and imposing a financial transactions tax. Yeah. I’m into that.
Is Bernie going to get elected? Do any of those proposals stand a chance in Congress? Probably not. But a boy can dream, no?
