Bernie's healthcare plan isn't too bold. It's too facile. And more than twice as costly

as he admits.

An Emory University expert in health care analysis who supports single payer says that Bernie’s plan will cost $1.1 trillion dollar more – each year – than Bernie is promising. And that it will require a 20% tax increase, not 8.4%.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mr-sanderss-ideas-are-not-too-bold-they-are-too-facile/2016/01/28/e7125bca-c60a-11e5-9693-933a4d31bcc8_story.html


What concerns us is not that Mr. Sanders’s program to tackle these issues is “radical,” as he put it, but that it is not very well thought out. We are far from the only ones, for example, to point out that his health-care plan rests on unbelievable assumptions about how much he could slash health-care costs without affecting the care ordinary Americans receive. “Their savings numbers are — well, politely said — simply wrong,” Emory University health-care expert Kenneth E. Thorpe told Vox. Mr. Thorpe, who is not hostile to single-payer systems of the type Mr. Sanders favors and has even advanced single-payer plans of his own, released an analysis Wednesday finding that Mr. Sanders’s proposal would cost $1 trillion more than the candidate estimated. That is not over a 10-year budget window. That is every year.


DETAILS FROM THE ANALYSIS BELOW:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/296831690/Kenneth-Thorpe-s-analysis-of-Bernie-Sanders-s-single-payer-proposal

“To fund the program, payroll and income taxes would have to increase from a combined 8.4% in the Sanders plan to 20% while also retaining all remaining tax increases on capital gains, increased marginal tax rates, the estate tax, and eliminating tax expenditures.

Even Medicaid recipients would pay more:

“Low income populations living in poverty receiving Medicaid would pay more through the 2.2% income tax and 6.2% reduction in wages.”

And even so:

“The plan is underfinanced by an average of $1.1 trillion per year.”