On Point / WBUR (8/2/18)
Did a conservative think tank just give Bernie Sanders the evidence for his “Medicare for All” plan? We’ll ask them and Sanders.
Guests
- Dylan Scott, heath care policy reporter for Vox. (@dylanlscott)
- Sen. Bernie Sanders, independent senator from Vermont. Introduced the Medicare for All Act of 2017. (@SenSanders)
- Charles Blahous, senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Former senior economic adviser to President George W. Bush.
- Carmen Heredia Rodriguez, reporter at Kaiser Health News. (@caheredia21)
- Vox: “Bernie Sanders’s $32 trillion Medicare-for-all plan is actually kind of a bargain” — “$32 trillion. That is how much federal spending would increase over 10 years under Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all bill, according to a brand-new estimate from the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Before you question the source (like Sanders did), you should know the left-leaning Urban Institute came up with the exact same number in 2016. It sure sounds like a lot of money, and conservatives hopped all over the figure on Monday morning. But there are a lot of ways to think about $32 trillion — and one might be that it’s actually kind of a bargain.”
- Mercatus Center: “The Costs of a National Single-Payer Healthcare System” — “M4A would markedly increase the demand for healthcare services while simultaneously cutting payments to providers by more than 40 percent, reducing payments to levels that are lower on average than providers’ current costs of providing care. It cannot be known how much providers will react to these losses by reducing the availability of existing health services, the quality of such services, or both.”
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Sen. Sanders: ‘Enormous Wastes In The System Can Be Eliminated By Medicare For All’
By Alex Schroeder
On Point / WBUR (8/2/18)
A study from the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center at George Mason University has come up with a new estimate for the price tag on the “Medicare for All” health care plan proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
$32 trillion. That’s how much federal spending could increase over a 10-year period. But some have been quick to point out that while the government would be spending more on health care, overall national health care expenditures would decrease by about $2 trillion.
Advocates and opponents of “Medicare for All” alike are pointing to this report by Charles Blahous to back their arguments. The most prominent proponent, Sen. Sanders, joined On Point Thursday to explain his single-payer plan and what this new analysis means.
(Commoner Call cartoon and photo by Mark L. Taylor, 2018. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )