Most of the discussion surrounding the Mercatus Center report on Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-All plan has been about whether the score shows that Sanders’s plan can realistically save $2 trillion over the first ten years of implementation. The answer to that question is “yes it does show that,” but Mercatus has been hard at work spinning gullible media platforms to say otherwise.

But as important as it is to get that fact right, it’s also important to make two other points that people often get wrong about Medicare for All and this study.

First, even Mercatus’s modified version (black line) of Bernie’s plan (red line) where Mercatus assumes zero provider payment cuts are really not that much more expensive than the status quo. Under the status quo, Americans as a whole will spend 21.1 percent of GDP on health care between 2022 and 2031, while under the Mercatus version of Medicare for All, it’s 22.2 percent — and for that extra 1.1 points of GDP, you get 30 million more insured, the virtual elimination of out of pocket expenses, and universal dental, hearing, and vision coverage.