It is time to face facts. The Democratic Party is dead and in its place has risen a European-style socialist party while still maintaining the old moniker. In days past, the Democrats were Keynesians like Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson but no more. Keynes and the economic theory that bears his name while being leftist in orientation, is still a capitalist outlook. It was and still is mainstream in capitalist economic theory and the old Democrats latched onto it like it was going out of style. Over time, socialists rose in the ranks of the party and in the past few years they have gained new prominence. The baton has been passed and the old guard of the Democratic Party that still accepts capitalism is fading away. Today socialists like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have seized power in their party and stand ready to test it in the coming elections. Socialists have supplanted the liberal capitalists on the left and this is a major problem.
This is so because the socialists either don’t understand economics or are plain and simple liars. A series of three articles will be written to back up this claim with this first focusing on the folly of a Medicare for all plan, the second focusing on that of the Green New Deal and the third focusing on the insufficiency of their plans to pay for all of it. Without further ado, onto the facts. Exhibit A of the case against the socialists is one of their new favorite pet projects: Medicare for all. Through the peachy words of a career politician Sanders’s campaign website[1] proclaims, “[that we must join] every other major country on Earth and guarantee health care to all people as a right, not a privilege, through a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program.” Here Sanders displays a great nonchalance for an expenditure that is by leaps and bounds outside of reality. There is not a single number on his official campaign website about how much that will cost. Nor is there a word about how to pay for this.
How expensive would Medicare for All be? Estimates vary a bit but they all suggest that it would be too extravagant for the Soviet central planning board to consider let alone the American congress. In July of last year, the Mercatus Center[2] asked this question to and came to a disturbing conclusion. Quoting from the abstract:
“The leading current bill to establish single-payer health insurance, the Medicare for All Act (M4A), would, under conservative estimates, increase federal budget commitments by approximately $32.6 trillion during its first 10 years of full implementation (2022–2031), assuming enactment in 2018. This projected increase in federal healthcare commitments would equal approximately 10.7 percent of GDP in 2022, rising to nearly 12.7 percent of GDP in 2031 and further thereafter. Doubling all currently projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections would be insufficient to finance the added federal costs of the plan. It is likely that the actual cost of M4A would be substantially greater than these estimates, which assume significant administrative and drug cost savings under the plan, and also assume that healthcare providers operating under M4A will be reimbursed at rates more than 40 percent lower than those currently paid by private health insurance .”
-Charles Blahous, Mercatus Center
Nothing more need be said. The plan is unworkable via their analysis. But is this study an outlier? Not quite. The CATO Institute[3] found that the upper estimates for how much a Medicare for all plan would cost figures out to $38 trillion ($38,000,000,000,000) over the next decade. When trillions start being thrown around like they are beginning to be, that looks like a rounding error. For perspective, only China, the combined European Union, India and America[4] have a higher gross domestic product than this rounding error as of 2017. The discrepancies alone in the new mandatory spending estimates for a Medicare for all program are greater than the total value of all final goods and services produced in almost any individual nation on Earth. This is not feasible.
As alluded to in the abstract of the Mercatus Center study, this cannot be paid for. The socialists claim to be geese capable of laying golden eggs. They claim that corporate greed and the ultra-rich present to paraphrase Orwell, a boot stamping in our face that they can not only remove but enrich everyone with said removal. What they don’t say is that the supposed plutocracy a misnomer, and that even by placing their own hammer and sickle emblazoned boot in the face of business and the rich, they cannot steal enough money to fund their programs. America is not Europe –what works across the Atlantic will not work here and any attempt to say different is either ignorant of the facts or just lying.
Photo credit: “Bernie Sanders” Wikiquote
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[1] https://berniesanders.com/issues/health-care-for-all/
[2] https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/blahous-costs-medicare-mercatus-working-paper-v1_1.pdf
[3] https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/questions-medicare-all-supporters-must-answer
[4] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2001rank.html =
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