The Fact-Checkers Are Clueless
CNN's Jake Tapper is the latest mainstream journalist to attack Bernie Sanders's Medicare-for-All plan. And just like all the others, his fact-checking is an absolute joke.
Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during an event on Capitol Hill last September introducing his Medicare for All Act of 2017. Alex Wong / Getty
CNN’s Jake Tapper released a video on Friday claiming to fact-check Bernie Sanders’s claims about the cost of Medicare for All. Tapper’s fact check follows in the tradition of the fact checks that came before him in that it is riddled with errors that the libertarian Mercatus Center fed him. At this point, I think it is safe to say that one of the main impediments to the success of Medicare for All is that liberal and centrist media is mostly too stupid or dishonest to accurately describe the proposal to their audience.
Mercatus Study
To understand where Tapper went off the rails, it is necessary to first explain the Mercatus Center paper at the center of all these controversies. On July 30, the Mercatus Center released a report by Charles Blahous scoring Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-All bill. The report says that under our current health care system, Americans as a whole will spend $59.7 trillion on health care between 2022 and 2031. Blahous then goes on to find that under Sanders’s Medicare-for-All bill, Americans will only spend $57.6 trillion, for a savings of roughly $2 trillion.
The study also finds that, because the federal government will take on almost all health care spending under Medicare for All, its share of total health spending will rise from $21.9 trillion to $54.6 trillion, an increase of around $32.6 trillion.
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