In a recent editorial for the Wall Street Journal, James Freeman plays the red scare card against Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All (M4A) plan, which he compares to the policies of “Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, whose mania for wealth redistribution has brought a country to its knees.”
Freeman gets the causation backwards. Venezuela is not in crisis because Maduro has been too generous with socialist goodies like health care. Quite the opposite. The Lancet reports that from 2010 to 2014, Maduro slashed health care spending by a third — and then stopped the publication of official statistics. Since then things have only gotten worse. Collapse of the health care system is one of the major reasons Venezuelans are fleeing their country by the tens of thousands every day.
But enough of Venezuela. Freeman misses the point about Sanders’ health care plan in more important ways, as well.
It is true that M4A would be expensive. Freeman relies on a study by Charles Blahous for the Mercatus Center, which estimates that M4A would cost taxpayers $32.6 trillion over ten years, even after positing substantial savings in total national health care spending. A more detailed study by Jodi Liu for RAND (of which Blahous appears not to have been aware when he wrote his Mercatus paper) comes in a significantly lower. It estimates that a baseline version of M4A would add about $1.8 trillion a year to net federal healthcare spending without cost savings and $1.7 trillion a year with. (Those numbers assume that current revenue sources for health care remain in place but do not include any proposed new revenue sources.) A trillion here, a trillion there — either way, it’s real money.
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Freeman gets the causation backwards. Venezuela is not in crisis because Maduro has been too generous with socialist goodies like health care. Quite the opposite. The Lancet reports that from 2010 to 2014, Maduro slashed health care spending by a third — and then stopped the publication of official statistics. Since then things have only gotten worse. Collapse of the health care system is one of the major reasons Venezuelans are fleeing their country by the tens of thousands every day.
But enough of Venezuela. Freeman misses the point about Sanders’ health care plan in more important ways, as well.
It is true that M4A would be expensive. Freeman relies on a study by Charles Blahous for the Mercatus Center, which estimates that M4A would cost taxpayers $32.6 trillion over ten years, even after positing substantial savings in total national health care spending. A more detailed study by Jodi Liu for RAND (of which Blahous appears not to have been aware when he wrote his Mercatus paper) comes in a significantly lower. It estimates that a baseline version of M4A would add about $1.8 trillion a year to net federal healthcare spending without cost savings and $1.7 trillion a year with. (Those numbers assume that current revenue sources for health care remain in place but do not include any proposed new revenue sources.) A trillion here, a trillion there — either way, it’s real money.
Read more »
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