Paul Krugman: Bernie Sanders is wrong and Hillary Clinton is right

[Rose Siding]

Health Reform Realities
Paul Krugman
JAN. 18, 2016
....

The question for progressives — a question that is now central to the Democratic primary — is whether these failings mean that they should re-litigate their own biggest political success in almost half a century, and try for something better.

My answer, as you might guess, is that they shouldn’t, that they should seek incremental change on health care (Bring back the public option!) and focus their main efforts on other issues — that is, that Bernie Sanders is wrong about this and Hillary Clinton is right. But the main point is that we should think clearly about why health reform looks the way it does.......

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/opinion/health-reform-realities.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region

[Cha]

1. Good find, Rose.. it makes good sense that Hillary is right.. glad Krugman is speaking out on this.

[Cha]

2. Sorry, the link doesn't work.

[ismnotwasm]

3. Here

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/opinion/health-reform-realities.html?_r=0


A very interesting read

[Cha]

4. Thank you, ismnotwasm~

[yallerdawg]

16. Paul Krugman nails it!

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

[Rose Siding]

6. Thanks, fixed -and more from Krugman, Klein and Chait-

Hate it when that happens!

snip>Put it this way: for all the talk about being honest and upfront, even Sanders ended up delivering mostly smoke and mirrors — or as Ezra Klein says, puppies and rainbows. Despite imposing large middle-class taxes, his “gesture toward a future plan”, as Ezra puts it, relies on the assumption of huge cost savings. If you like, it involves a huge magic asterisk.

Now, it’s true that single-payer systems in other advanced countries are much cheaper than our health care system. And some of that could be replicated via lower administrative costs and the generally lower prices Medicare pays. But to get costs down to, say, Canadian levels, we’d need to do what they do: say no to patients, telling them that they can’t always have the treatment they want.

Saying no has two cost-saving effects: it saves money directly, and it also greatly enhances the government’s bargaining power, because it can say, for example, to drug producers that if they charge too much they won’t be in the formulary.

But it’s not something most Americans want to hear about; foreign single-payer systems are actually more like Medicaid than they are like Medicare.

And Sanders isn’t coming clean on that — he’s promising Medicaid-like costs while also promising no rationing....
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/health-reform-is-hard/?_r=0

The Ezra Klein piece he references is here-

Bernie Sanders’s single-payer plan isn’t a plan at all
Sanders's long-awaited health care plan is, by turns, vague and unrealistic.

http://www.vox.com/2016/1/17/10784528/bernie-sanders-single-payer-health-care

Jonathon Chait put one out, too-

The Case Against Bernie Sanders

snip>...Do we support Sanders not just in his role as lovable Uncle Bernie, complaining about inequality, but as the actual Democratic nominee for president? My answer to that question is no....

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/case-against-bernie-sanders.html

[Cha]

8. No worries.. "The Case Against Bernie Sanders" You should headline these, Rose.. much

better than the Wapo's Chris "the rw tool" Cillizza who said BS won. LOL

Sanders has promised to replace Obamacare with a single-payer plan, without having any remotely plausible prospects for doing so. Many advocates of single-payer imagine that only the power of insurance companies stands in their way, but the more imposing obstacles would be reassuring suspicious voters that the change in their insurance (from private to public) would not harm them and — more difficult still — raising the taxes to pay for it. As Sarah Kliff details, Vermont had to abandon hopes of creating its own single-payer plan. If Vermont, one of the most liberal states in America, can’t summon the political willpower for single-payer, it is impossible to imagine the country as a whole doing it. Not surprisingly, Sanders's health-care plan uses the kind of magical-realism approach to fiscal policy usually found in Republican budgets, conjuring trillions of dollars in savings without defining their source.

Thank you!

[Rose Siding]

9. I'm just glad some real vetting is happening

Here's some more

Jonathon Cohn-

...Whether other independent analyses come to the same conclusion remains to be seen. But the challenge of single-payer has never been whether, on paper, such a plan could deliver comprehensive benefits to all Americans at a low price. It’s whether such a plan could survive the political process -- and how its implementation would play with the public. For example, Sanders envisions huge savings from lower drug prices, but efforts to extract far more modest savings from the industry have failed repeatedly in the past. And while programs like the Veterans Affairs health system get steep drug discounts, they also operate strict formularies limiting access to drugs -- something that many Americans would probably find objectionable.

“One can certainly design a single-payer plan on paper that saves money for the middle class by reducing payments to doctors and hospitals significantly and shifting the financing of health care from premiums to a very progressive tax structure,” Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, said on Sunday evening. “Whether such a plan could ever pass and be signed into law in that form is a very different question.”

That political difficulty, along with the daunting challenge of blowing up the current system and creating something new in its place, is a big reason Clinton has not endorsed anything as ambitious as Sanders -- and has been critical of him lately.

“After weeks of denying the legitimacy of the questions Hillary Clinton raised about flaws in the health care legislation he’s introduced 9 times over 20 years, he proposed a new plan two hours before the debate," Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon said in a statement Sunday evening. "When you’re running for President and you’re serious about getting results for the American people, details matter -- and Senator Sanders is making them up as he goes along.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-health-plan_569c3ddde4b0b4eb759ecf51

Michael Cohen at The Globe

...How someone who’s been in Washington as long as Sanders can believe that all that stands between doing “what the American people want [Congress] to do” is something as simple as reforming campaign finance is stunning. Sanders, who brags the NRA gives him a D- rating, is the same politician who supported legislation giving gun manufacturers immunity from civil lawsuits and voted against the Brady Bill. Why? Perhaps it is because Sanders comes from a state that has few gun control laws and lots of gun owners. Yes red-state senators who oppose gun control receive contributions from the NRA. They also have constituents who oppose gun control measures and vote on the issue — like Bernie Sanders. It’s as if in Sanders’ mind, parochialism, ideology, or politics plays no role . . . in politics.

This is frankly what’s become so frustrating about Sanders campaign. I give the man credit for raising issues all too rarely heard in presidential debates, and as a protest candidate, Sanders is playing a vital role in the political process. But now that Sanders’ campaign has gathered steam — and he is ludicrously claiming that he’s more electable than Hillary Clinton — Sanders needs to do more than just sound the same tiresome platitudes and one-dimensional arguments about the evils of Wall Street. He needs to take the job of running for president seriously. If Sunday night was any indication, that’s still not happening.

The simple fact is that there were three candidates on the debate stage Sunday night — and only one of them is qualified to be president. It’s not Martin O’Malley, and it’s not Bernie Sanders.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/01/18/bernie-sanders-doesn-get-how-politics-works/GYDR7MTl0Vu3TSAHRMWipJ/story.html

[Cha]

10. I love Brian Fallon..

“After weeks of denying the legitimacy of the questions Hillary Clinton raised about flaws in the health care legislation he’s introduced 9 times over 20 years, he proposed a new plan two hours before the debate," Clinton spokesperson Brian Fallon said in a statement Sunday evening. "When you’re running for President and you’re serious about getting results for the American people, details matter -- and Senator Sanders is making them up as he goes along.”

Thank you.. I'm glad he's getting more vetted too.. taking long enough.

[Rose Siding]

12. You know all of them have a theme, too

Chait, Krugman, Klein, all of them strong, liberal thinkers aren't just vetting Bernie; They're choosing Hillary. That's significant.

[Cha]

14. Yes, it is.. love being in reality!

[Thinkingabout]

5. Yes, we had waited for a long time for healthcare, not perfect but a start.

We will need to get Democrats elected on every level to get national health insurance. It will take years to accomplish what is needed, it will be based on how much this is desired and the work to get Democrats elected.

[Gman]

7. As always, Krugman is spot on.

This reminds me very much of in 2010, when "progressives" we're irate because we did not get single payer, they decided to "teach the party a lesson", to quote the popular phrase in DU at the time, and stay home that election. They wanted to show their strength of numbers by staying home. They encouraged others to stay home too

Of course, the idiots never even considered it was a redistributing election year. The GOP ran the table in 10 and we have the problems that we have nowwuth no hope of getting back congress until 2021 at the earliest when we can try to retake some statehouses and redraw lines

Should the unlikely happen and Sanders is elected prez, he will be severely excoriated, as was Obama by the far left.

[Hoyt]

11. Well, time to throw Krugman under the bus. I hope he or someone like him looks at the figures

Sanders released for his plan to see if his proposal saves the average family $5000.

[Rose Siding]

15. Ezra Klein has a little on that-

...Clinton's third attack was that Sanders's plan would raise taxes on the middle class. In response, Sanders gets very detailed on the financing of his plan. It would raise taxes on the middle class — in part through a 2.2 percent tax increase on all income, and in part by a 6.2 percent "income-based premium" on employers (which would, in turn, get passed onto workers through lower wages and higher prices).

The rest of the financing would come through a raft of new taxes on the rich. Sanders would raise marginal rates on income over $250,000, he would raise the tax rate on capital gains and dividend income, he would hike the estate tax, and he would close sundry deductions and loopholes.

In general, I'm comfortable with higher taxes on the rich — though they've risen substantially in the Obama era already — but tax increases of the scale Sanders proposes here would begin to have real economic drawbacks. European countries tend to pay for their health-care systems through more broad-based, economically efficient taxes like VATs; Sanders's effort to fund a universal health-care system so heavily on the backs of the wealthy would be unprecedented.

All in all, Sanders wants to raise taxes by a bit over a trillion dollars per year — which may not sound like much to those who remember the Obamacare debate, but remember that the numbers that got thrown around for Obamacare were 10-year estimates. Adding inflation, Sanders will be raising taxes by close to $15 trillion when the Congressional Budget Office applies its normal scoring window.

http://www.vox.com/2016/1/17/10784528/bernie-sanders-single-payer-health-care

[brer cat]

13. Good opinion piece.

I hate to see dems fighting over this because our compassion is our strength, and we all want to see all Americans with access to safe, affordable health care. Krugman and Hillary are right that incremental change and realistic goals should be our platform. Offering pie in the sky may fire up Bernie's base, but it would strengthen the republicans in the general election: they would successfully haul out rationing, long wait times, higher taxes, and grandma losing her medicare.

PBO didn't leave the insurance companies in the mix because they "bought" him off but because they were a necessary part of an orderly transition.

[Hekate]

17. Thank you, Prof. Krugman, Nobelist in Economics, author of Conscience of a Liberal....

...and general voice of sanity.

[mcar]

18. K&R