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

[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