“The question of how much Sanders’s proposals would cost has set off a “war of the wonks,” with liberal economists on the front lines.
Sanders’s plan already has essentially no chance of passing Congress, given that Republicans are expected to control at least one chamber in 2017, but there are questions about the policy as well as the politics.
The main challenge to Sanders’s math comes from Kenneth Thorpe, a well-respected health economist at Emory University who advised Vermont on its efforts to create a state-level single-payer system.
Thorpe says Sanders’s plan would cost about $1 trillion per year more than Sanders says it would: $2.5 trillion per year versus $1.38 trillion per year. The resulting funding shortfall would mean that Sanders would have to hike taxes even more to pay for his plan, he says.
Thorpe also argues that Sanders’s proposed 8.4 percent in extra payroll and income taxes would instead have to rise to a 20 percent combined extra tax.
Sanders argues that middle class families would save thousands of dollars under his proposal because they would no longer have to pay health insurance premiums. But the higher taxes envisioned under Thorpe’s analysis would flip the script for many people: He found that 71 percent of workers and their families currently with private insurance would end up paying more, not less, under Sanders’s plan.”
“ Much of the dispute among the experts, and the $1 trillion difference in cost estimates, centers on how much savings would be achieved from switching to a single-payer healthcare system.”
“ Companies that currently pay high health costs for their workers would see huge savings by no longer having to pay for healthcare, but smaller companies that don’t offer much coverage would now be hit with a new tax, said Henry Aaron, a health expert at the Brookings Institution.
“You are going to be spreading across the American industrial landscape huge amounts of income redistribution,” Aaron said.
Friedman contests this skepticism, saying other advanced countries with single-payer systems are able to provide good care at much lower costs.” - Debate rages over the cost of Bernie's government, the hill.com, 02/18/2016
Link to the entire article appears below:
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/269786-debate-rages-over-the-cost-of-bernies-government
Note: Regardless of the “expert” discussions/arguments above, there is only one single-payer system in the world and that is Canada. Multiple single-payer systems, which implicitly exist as an argument point above, do not in fact exist. For more information see link below associated with the post entitled ACA/Obamacare: How Universal is “Single Payer” Healthcare? Not Very!
http://thelastembassy.blogspot.com/2016/01/acaobamacare-how-universal-is-single.html
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