Economist Takes Wall Street Journal to Task on Sanders "Hit Piece"

[Fawke Em]

The Journal correctly puts the additional federal spending for health care under HR 676 (a single payer health plan) at $15 trillion over ten years. It neglects to add, however, that by spending these vast sums, we would, as a country, save nearly $5 trillion over ten years in reduced administrative waste, lower pharmaceutical and device prices, and by lowering the rate of medical inflation.

These financial savings would be felt by businesses and by state and local governments who would no longer be paying for health insurance for their employees; and by retirees and working Americans who would no longer have to pay for their health insurance or for co-payments and deductibles. Beyond these financial savings, HR 676 would also save thousands of lives a year by expanding access to health care for the uninsured and the underinsured.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-friedman/the-wall-street-journal-k_b_8143062.html

[JackInGreen]

1. Oooh shit

Isn't he the source the WSJ sited primarily?
Whoops....

[Fawke Em]

2. Seems to me the WSJ needs to run a massive correction. eom

[tex-wyo-dem]

11. Does it really surprise you at all...

That a corporate rag would neglect to report on the resulting savings of such a program? Just like it neglected to factor in the long term investment in the American society with regards to education, health care, employment, etc., which will pay dividends for decades to come?

I put this in a purely business perspective...Bernie's proposals are also the right and morally just way of treating the human beings in our country.

All of these things Bernie has been talking about: education, workers rights, minimum wage, bad trade deals and decent paying jobs, health care, family leave, environmental policy, voting rights, just legal system, etc etc etc, are all connected to having a happy productive and just society. Invest in this idea and it will pay dividends over and over and over...

[Hortensis]

18. No surprise at all. I was sure it was a hit piece without reading. +$15T!

[LWolf]

16. But I won't hold my breath. nt

[ljm2002]

17. Yes he is the source the WSJ used...

...to make their fraudulent argument:

Gerald Friedman, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

[cyberswede]

3. Good. nt

[Bonobo]

4. And I'm wasting my time dealing with it on a one-to-one level right now. nt

[Live and Learn]

5. Good info. nt

[SoapBox]

6. $15 TRILLION!!!!!

...over 10 years.

Oh.

That's it?!?

[Uncle Joe]

7. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Fawke Em.

[laserhaas]

8. Who would have thunk that WSJ is lame stream?

Really!
.
.

[JDPriestly]

9. K&R.

[grasswire]

10. kick

Ari Berman on MSNBC showed his Hillary colors this evening when he featured the WSJ article and then simply said "some are critical of those numbers"

[neverforget]

12. Yeah well, Bernie is ruining everything!

[Midnight Writer]

13. And how much for Trump's brownshirts going door to door hunting "illegals"?

What will be the cost of sifting through our cities, communities and households searching for immigrants? Who will do the massive task of searching for, properly identifying, detaining and deporting immigrants, and how much will this operation cost? And what of the "due process" you may recall reading about in our Constitution?

How long before America is shocked at daily film footage of immigrants being hunted, chased, arrested and forcibly put on trains? How long before we are disgusted at the sight of our police and National Guard busting down doors and dragging men, women and children out of their homes to be forced on to the deportation trains? What does the WSJ think of this?

[tblue37]

14. KnR. nt

[JDPriestly]

15. Tuition costs? Students borrow the money to pay for college.

When our students are better educated, they can work more efficiently. And our society produces more for less money. Bernie's proposal is to shift the responsibility for paying the cost of tuition from loan repayment to higher taxes on Wall Street trades of specific types.

We pay for our healthcare one way or another. Bernie is proposing. a cost-effective way of paying for it that will eliminate wasteful payments that are unnecessarily made to middlemen that is private, for- profit insurance companies and exorbitant profits to pharmaceutical companies and similar waste.

Family leave also is not a new expense that Bernie is adding, at least not in its entirety. As it is, when a baby is born, it is obviously unable to care for itself. Someone has to nurse or feed it, change its diapers, put it down for its nap. A working mother now must find someone to care for the baby. Same for the working father. The parents either enlist a family member or in most cases when no family member is available, pay someone to care for the new baby. The baby care is not free to the parents of the newborn. The financial cost for infant care exists. Bernie proposes that instead of paying parents to work when they have a new baby so they can pay a babysitter, these costs should be shared by taxpayers most of whom will at one point in their lives benefit from the family leave themselves. This idea brings an additional emotional and social benefit in that it will strengthen family ties in families with working parents. Other countries do this. It is a matter of paying the cost of childcare in the form of a tax paid to the parents rather than in the form of the employer paying the parents to hire a babysitter. As in the other programs it is not really a matter of adding new costs in our society but rather of paying for existing costs from combined tax revenue rather than out of the pockets of working people.

And so it is with each of Bernie's proposals. The costs are either already being paid in a wasteful way or borne often by people at the most vulnerable times in their lives or in the case of health insurance already but inefficiently by society as a whole.

Working mothers of pre-school children generally pay for childcare. Often that childcare does not prepare the child adequately for life, for school, for. Living peacefully in our society.

In short, Bernie is not introducing new programs to satisfy needs that he imagines exist or that are even new or controversial. Rather he is proposing ways to join together to pay to satisfy these needs.

I agree with Bernie. Better to pay for college by charging those who earn the most and are most likely to be advanced in their lives and careers and doing well and able to pay. than to expect a young person just starting a career and life to somehow repay a loan.

Bernie's proposals will at worst break even in terms of the costs to society as a whole and probably due to efficiencies reduce costs.