Sorry, Bernie Is Right
Mainstream fact-checkers are still trying to discredit Bernie Sanders's Medicare-for-All plan. But there's no way around it: single-payer is entirely realistic.
US senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) greets supporters as he arrives at an event on health care on September 13, 2017 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Alex Wong / Getty
Two weeks ago, the libertarian Mercatus Center released a report estimating the cost of Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-All proposal. Like most think tank products, the author and communications team behind the Koch-funded Mercatus report carefully cultivated a certain kind of media coverage in pursuit of their political agenda. In this case, the political goal was to undermine Medicare for All by getting journalists to write that it was impossibly expensive.
The Strategy
You can tell that this was their goal by looking at how the Mercatus paper was written, and specifically how its abstract was written. The first sentence contains the claim that many journalists put as their headline and lede: Medicare for All will “increase federal budget commitments by approximately $32.6 trillion” between 2022 and 2031. The rest of the abstract, and indeed the rest of the text of the paper, omits the more important fact that their estimate states that overall health expenditures would fall by $2 trillion over that period.
The abstract then says “doubling all currently projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections would be insufficient to finance the added federal costs of the plan.” This claim makes it seem like the author is saying we would have to more than double federal taxes, but this is only because the author curiously excluded payroll taxes from the sentence, despite the fact that payroll taxes are the second-largest federal revenue source and the fact that payroll taxes are the main proposed mechanism for raising the funds.
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