The question of how to pay for Medicare for All has always irked single-payer advocates, mostly because we’ve always known that paying for it is easy — the United States is the wealthiest country on earth, and we’re spending far more now than we would be under Medicare for All. The real obstacle is not the cost, as those immersed in the fight for single-payer understand well, but the battle we’ll need to wage against insurance companies, drug companies, and the political establishment in order to take public control over what’s rightfully ours.

Check the news, however, and you’d think the only reason we haven’t yet won Medicare for All is that nobody has figured out how to finance it. Media outlets frequently repeat political attacks on Medicare for All’s costs while ignoring all firm evidence about its benefits and inevitable savings. The question has gotten far more play in presidential debates than any concern about the insane profits of insurance and pharmaceutical companies, or the political establishment’s effort to bait-and-switch on the promise of universal health care by rallying around watered-down alternatives.

The narrative is completely wrong. Detailed economic studies have demonstrated a variety of options to fund the program through stable, progressive taxes while saving the vast majority of people money by eliminating all premiums and out-of-pocket spending. The media has happily amplified lies and bogus talking points about affordability and taxes to create a problem that quite simply isn’t there.