The Democrats running for President have been pretty sketchy on exactly how they will pay for their Medicare For All (ie, Single Payer) system. Of course, they want The Rich to pay their fair share, because that’s the default position, never considering that the money will disappear. We remember that it failed in Vermont, and California turned it down because it would cost twice the state’s annual budget
The Democratic plan for a 42% national sales tax
If you’re a Democrat who supports “Medicare for All,†pick your poison. You can ruin your political career and immolate your party by imposing a ruinous new sales tax, a gargantuan income tax hike or a surtax on corporate income that would wreck thousands of businesses.
This is the cost of bold plans.
Supporters of Medicare for All, the huge, single-payer government health plan backed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and several other Democratic presidential candidates, say it’s time to think big and move to a health plan that covers everyone. Getting there is a bit tricky, however. A variety of analyses estimate that Medicare for All would require at least $3 trillion in new spending. That’s about as much tax revenue as the government brings in now. So if paid for through new taxes, federal taxation would have to roughly double.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) has done voters a favor by spelling out what kinds of new taxes it would take to come up with that much money. Warren justifies many of her programs by saying all it would take is “two cents†from the wealthy. That’s a reference to her 2% wealth tax on ultra-millionaires. But Medicare for All would be so expensive that if you taxed top earners at 100%—that’s right, if you took all the income of couples earning more than $408,000 per year—you’d still fall far short. And everybody getting taxed at 100% would obviously stop working.
Okay, that won’t do it. So what will? CRFB outlined a variety of options. A 42% national sales tax (known as a valued-added tax) would generate about $3 trillion in revenue. But it would destroy the consumer spending that’s the backbone of the U.S. economy. A tax of that magnitude would be like 42% inflation, wrecking consumer budgets and the many companies that depend on them, from Walmart and Amazon to your local car dealer.
And people wouldn’t spend.
Other options include a 32% payroll tax split between employers and workers or a 25% income surtax on everybody. Or, the government could cut 80% of spending on everything but health care, which would include highways, airports and the Pentagon. Or here’s a good one: Just borrow the money and quadruple Washington’s annual deficits.
Wait, I thought Democrats said this wouldn’t cost us anything?
The best idea might be charging every enrollee in the new program $7,500 per year, so they’d be paying directly for the coverage they’re getting. Some people pay more than that now for health care, by purchasing insurance outright or sacrificing pay raises in exchange for employer coverage. It would still be a nifty trick to propose that to voters.
Yup, good luck with that.
If they did it properly they would not ruin the economy. Sort of.
Nah the medicare for all payment plans is a scaremongering tactic by the opposition.
Health care is paid for now. It can be paid for with Medicare for all. Everyones fear is not how you pay for it. Its how many jobs are lost when you adopt it as in crushing and entire industry. Destroying it and making it go away….IE the Health Insurance companies and really crummy insurance that wont pay for anything. Its 100,000 doctors telling everyone to go FF themselves. Its having glorified nurses being your doctor on the dole to the government. Its having the US government take over the entire health care industry which will be an unmitigated disaster.
Medicare for all can easily be paid for and in fact most employers would love to give their burden over to the government rather than having entire staffs on payroll to deal with benefits.
ROLCON
Sure you can pay for medicare for all. Simply take every penny businesses are paying now for healthcare and force them to pay the government. My wife’s company pays 14,400 per year per employee. She pays like 100 a month out of her paycheck. Instead of that 14.4k going to an insurance company it would go to the US government.
Everyone would pay premiums to the government. What would flourish would be private healthcare companies using Medicare advantage but now instead of 60 million people having it, it would be 320 million.
The problem has never been paying for it IMO. Its been the ruin it will cause the healthcare infrastructure. Ie hospitals, clinics, medical devices, prescription drugs etc that will collapse.
If it is phased in over 20 years it might work. However the government cant do anything right so in reality it will be a total disaster like obamacare, it will cost 10x’s as much as it should and taxes will indeed go up drastically. Because healthcare is now adminstered by the US Government.
Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.
Will a socialist program for the first time not run out of other people’s money?
I believe the odds of that are about 0%.
People proposing “Medicare for all” reforms are lying because based on the details they are actually proposing “Medicaid for all”, but that name obviously didn’t poll as well.
Even the huge numbers cited as the costs of their program are woefully understated, because they are just scaling up current costs of Medicare/Medicaid to cover more people, when those costs are artificially low because they are subsidized by what providers can charge private insurance customers. When private insurance is outlawed the health care system is not sustainable using the governments reimbursement rates.
But it’s FREEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!
One more thing I would like to add to this conversation I’m having with myself…..LOL.
The left in 2018 won the house on healthcare. The number one issue was healthcare. The right proclaimed just vote for us and we will FIX Obamacare. Well America did vote for them and they were CLUELESS. They had no plan. They had no consensus even among themselves.
They simply told the voters what they wanted to hear believing they would never be in a position to have the power to FIX obamacare.
JUST like today. The democrats are telling the voters what they want to hear. Unless they win all 3 branches of government back in 2020 they will NEVER pass Obamacare or the Green New Deal.
Its all lies, because they know they will always have the fallback on well its the GOP blocking us. Those racist bastages are the problem. Just like in 2008 when Obama had literally a veto proof government they basically passed two bills of NOTE.
Don’t worry folks. No matter who becomes prez we will survive, unless civil war starts because both sides are LIARS, thieves and cheats when it comes to promises. Thats why everyone hates Trump so much. He actually attempts to keep his promises.
Estimates of any sort at that point are pointless. The truth is so far away from what we are used to that we literally cannot imagine it. We do know that economic activity plunges once sales taxes get over 15%. (we tried it already). We already know that sales taxes are self limiting because of that. We also already know that when government is in charge of “lowering costs” on health care, they do it by simply making some treatments unavailable to most people (politically connected people still get the best of everything). Right now, our government is in the process of making insurance unaffordable in order to create the conditions where everyone has no choice but medicare for all. So right now, they intentionally pass laws requiring insurance to provide the best of everything, to everyone.
If you think economic activity plunges once sales tax get over 15% wait till you see the plunge that occurs when the politicians put 33 million Americans and 25 million illegals on “Medicare for all”. We already need private Medicare Advantage to supplement Medicare into decent coverage.