Medicare for All could save the country $5.1 trillion over ten years

[Gothmog]

65. I live in the real world and the study cited in OP is essentially worthless

I am not hostile to single payer and in fact I am looking forward to when I can drop my firm's insurance and go on Medicare. All of my law partners go on Medicare as soon as they are eligible.

This study is based on societal savings that are worthless with respect to paying for the single payer program. sanders is careful to never discuss how much his plan will cost tax payers and instead cite worthless studies like the one in the OP. Sanders has utterly failed to convince anyone to adopt his program because he will not tell them how much it costs to run and how to pay for it.

I note that AOC had a very bad time in an interview on CNN with Jake Tapper on this

Here is a transcript of the interview and a discussion of why AOC did not answer the simple question posed to her by Jake Tapper https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/18/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-tapper/index.html

Ocasio-Cortez is making the case that if government took over more aspects of peoples' lives currently controlled by private industry, costs would go down on things like health insurance. So the $40 trillion price tag for her programs would be less.

But again, that isn't an answer on where the money might come from to pay for them. Let's buy into Ocasio-Cortez's case that costs would shrink if the government, rather than the free market, ran things. Let's even say it would halve the costs of the programs that she supports making into law. That's still $20 trillion -- which has to come from somewhere, right?

Tapper is doing an important public service here. He's highlighting the difference between campaigning and governing. The truth is that as a candidate you can be for almost anything because you don't have any responsibility. You aren't in charge of managing the federal budget or reducing our deficit and debt obligations. Free stuff sounds great! But free stuff is almost never free.

Trying to claim that societal savings will pay for a single payer plan in the real world does not work. One has to tell policy makers how much the plan will cost the government and how will the government raise the money to pay for such plan.

I am happy to discuss a single payer plan that is based on facts and not based on magical societal savings