The Urban Institute’s Attack On Single Payer: Ridiculous Assumptions Yield Ridiculous Estimates

[LiberalArkie]

The Urban Institute and the Tax Policy Center today released analyses of the costs of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ domestic policy proposals, including single-payer national health insurance. They claim that Sanders’ proposals would raise the federal deficit by $18 trillion over the next decade.

We won’t address all of the issues covered in these analyses, just single-payer Medicare for all. To put it bluntly, the estimates (which were prepared by John Holahan and colleagues) are ridiculous. They project outlandish increases in the utilization of medical care, ignore vast savings under single-payer reform, and ignore the extensive and well-documented experience with single-payer systems in other nations - which all spend far less per person on health care than we do.

The authors’ anti-single-payer bias is also evident from their incredible claims that physicians’ incomes would be squeezed (which contradicts their own estimates positing a sharp rise in spending on physician services), and that patients would suffer huge disruptions, despite the fact that the implementation of single-payer systems elsewhere, as well as the start-up of Medicare, were disruption-free.

We outline below some of the most glaring errors in the Holahan analysis (which served as the basis for Tax Policy Center’s estimates) regarding health care spending under the Sanders plan.

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Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-himmelstein/the-urban-institutes-attack-on-single-payer-ridiculous-assumptions-yield-ridiculous-estimates_b_9876640.html

[Hoyt]

1. Sanders believes he can go from $3 Trillion per year for health care to $1.37 Trillion while

covering millions of uninsured, removing coinsurance/deductibles, offering dental, etc. All that is laudable, but he needs to be honest about cost.

Why would Urban Institute lie?

[hobbit709]

2. "No we can't" seems to be your standard response.

[Hoyt]

3. We can if we are honest about cost, chance Congress will enact it, etc.

[ebayfool]

4. K & R! TY for the link LiberalArkie n/t

[Recursion]

5. If American doctors started making half of what they make now, we would have European-level costs

Which isn't that surprising, given that American doctors make about double the OECD average, and provider reimbursement is the single biggest chunk of the costs pie. The Urban Institute analysis assumes we won't actually cut doctors' salaries in half, which is probably a realistic assumption, particularly given that we're going to ask them to do more work once everybody is insured (which, frankly, we probably don't even have enough doctors in the country to handle).