The eye-popping cost of Medicare for All [View all]

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s refusal to answer repeated questions at Tuesday night’s debate about how she would fund Medicare for All underscores the challenge she faces finding a politically acceptable means to meet the idea’s huge price tag — a challenge that only intensified today with the release of an eye-popping new study.

The Urban Institute, a center-left think tank highly respected among Democrats, is projecting that a plan similar to what Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders are pushing would require $34 trillion in additional federal spending over its first decade in operation. That’s more than the federal government’s total cost over the coming decade for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined, according to the most recent Congressional Budget Office projections.

In recent history, only during the height of World War II has the federal government tried to increase taxes, as a share of the economy, as fast as would be required to offset the cost of a single-payer plan, federal figures show. There are “no analogous peacetime tax increases,” says Leonard Burman, a public-administration professor at Syracuse University and a former top tax official in both the Bill Clinton administration and at the CBO. Raising that much more tax revenue “is plausible in the sense that it is theoretically possible,” Burman told me. “But the revolution that would come along with it would get in the way.”

At the debate, as throughout the campaign, Warren refused to provide any specifics about how she would fund a single-payer plan. Instead, whether questioned by moderators or challenged by other candidates, she recycled variants on the same talking points she has used in venues from campaign town halls to a recent appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Rather than explaining what revenue she would raise to fund the plan, Warren insisted that under single payer, middle-income families would save more money with the elimination of health-care premiums, co-pays, and deductibles, regardless of any taxes imposed. “Costs will go up for the wealthy and for big corporations, and for hard-working middle-class families, costs will go down,” she said at the debate.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/healthcare/the-eye-popping-cost-of-medicare-for-all/ar-AAISFNC?li=BBnb7Kz