The Nation: What the WSJ Gets Totally Wrong About Bernie Sanders’s Agenda

[portlander23]

What ‘The Wall Street Journal’ Gets Totally Wrong About Bernie Sanders’s Agenda

But according to the very data cited by The Journal’s Laura Meckler, Sanders’ highly progressive proposals wouldn’t cost the United States a single penny, on net, over that ten-year window. In fact, they’d cost less, overall, than what we’d spend without them.

It’s not hard to understand why. The lion’s share of the “cost”—$15 trillion—would pay for opening up Medicare to Americans of all ages. (Meckler notes that Sanders hasn’t released a detailed proposal, so she relies on an analysis of HR 676, Rep. John Conyers’ Medicare-for-all bill.)

Rather than cost us more as a society, this proposal would only shift spending from businesses and households to the federal government by replacing our current patchwork system of public and private insurance with a single, more efficient system of financing.

But it wouldn’t be a dollar-for-dollar transfer from the private to the public sector. According to Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who authored the analysis cited by The Journal, that transition would reduce American health care costs by almost $10 trillion over ten years through economies of scale, better control of pharmaceutical costs and savings on administrative bloat.

Friedman also projects that as every American got coverage, we’d spend close to $5 trillion more on actual health care services. So we would get more health care and still end up saving around $5 billion on net. In other words, Sanders’ Medicare expansion would cost $15 trillion, but without it American businesses and taxpayers would spend $20 trillion over the same period, while still leaving millions uninsured.

This shows just how badly we get ripped off under our current system. And as Friedman writes at The Huffington Post, “the economic benefits from Senator Sander’s proposal would be even greater than these static estimates” because they don’t factor in “the productivity boost coming from a more efficient health care system and a healthier population.”

Sanders Responds to the WSJ on Single Payer

Matthew Yglesias: Sanders' $18 trillion in proposed spending is more affordable than it sounds

Sanders to WSJ: I’ll Create Jobs, Provide Better Care for Less

[Cheese Sandwich]

1. WSJ is selling the big lie that paying private health corps. is not a cost

Only when the government acts to help people then it counts as a cost. When we're all forced to buy private insurance that's not a cost in their book apparently.

Horribly dishonest reporting.

[Z_California]

2. WSJ isn't the only one spreading that lie

Horribly intellectually dishonest arguments on DU as well.

[Hydraulico]

3. Sanders is a threat to wall Street

That's why they hate.

[MisterP]

4. they still think it's about "free stuff" or just various bennies for young, old, and middle

but what it's about is our total inability to get any of these things passed, of hearing promises of the moon and sun in our pots come from people who then turn around and pop the champagne with the other rich guys and hack every investigation we have to rely on to bits and sell it to multibillionaires to make them into, uh, multibillionaires

[LWolf]

5. K & R

[WillyT]

6. HUGE K & R !!! - THANK YOU !!!