There is now an actual study out and completed by Emory University health care expert Kenneth Thorpe, on Sanders health care plan.
Thorpe actually authored Vermont’s single-payer proposal, that ended up being shelved because it was going to cost Vermont taxpayers big time:
The numbers were stunning. To implement single-payer, the analysis showed, it would cost $4.3 billion in 2017, with Vermont taxpayers picking up $2.6 billion and the federal government covering the rest. To put the figures into perspective, Vermont’s entire fiscal 2015 budget, including both state and federal funds, is about $4.9 billion.
Shumlin’s office estimated the state would need to impose new personal income taxes of up to 9.5 percent, on top of current rates that range from 3.55 to 8.95 percent. Businesses would be hit with an 11.5 percent payroll tax, on top of 7.65 percent payroll taxes employer pay for Social Security and Medicare.
What’s most interesting about the Vox article is, the Sanders campaign engages Thorpe in a back and forth about the details via e-mail.
The Sanders campaign predictably calls the Thorpe study a "hatchet job” and yet they kept changing their own numbers during the e-mail discussion and that led Thorpe to say this:
"They are just throwing things against the wall to see what sticks,"
There’s a link in the article to Thorpe’s study.
I can confidently say we all want a better health care system. We want more people covered, but promising pie in the sky and fudging the numbers to win votes seems a bit disingenuous.
Just a warning to Mr. Thorpe, shut you e-mail down now, Facebook, Twitter and all other forms of being contacted. Save yourself now!
www.vox.com/...
Bernie Sanders's health care plan is underfunded by almost $1.1 trillion a year, a new analysis by Emory University health care expert Kenneth Thorpe finds.
Thorpe isn't some right-wing critic skeptical of all single-payer proposals. Indeed, in 2006 he laid out a single-payer proposal for Vermont after being hired by the legislature, and was retained by progressive Vermont lawmakers again in 2014 as the state seriously considered single-payer, authoring a memo laying out alternative ways to expand coverage.
- Sanders assumes $324 billion more per year in prescription drug savings than Thorpe does. Thorpe argues that this is wildly implausible. "In 2014 private health plans paid a TOTAL of $132 billion on prescription drugs and nationally we spent $305 billion," he writes in an email. "With their savings drug spending nationally would be negative." (Emphasis mine.) The Sanders camp revised the number down to $241 billion when I pointed this out.
- Sanders assumes $438 billion more per year in administrative savings than Thorpe; Thorpe assumes that total health spending will fall by 4.7 percent because single-payer is simpler to administer, while the campaign has anticipated a reduction of 16 percent (changed in a later email to 13 percent).
Which is all to say that the gap between Thorpe and Sanders is the gap between an economist who is optimistic that single-payer can save some money and a campaign optimistic that it can save a huge amount of money. "Their savings numbers are — well, politely said — simply wrong," Thorpe writes in an email.
They're also apparently malleable. When I pointed out that the yearly savings numbers they were presenting on prescription drugs were literally impossible, the Sanders camp revised the number to $241 billion — huge and arguably implausible but not larger than total annual spending on prescription drugs. A follow-up email also revised down the assumed administrative savings from 16 percent to 13 percent and the savings on utilization up from $216 billion to a whopping $660 billion.
"They are just throwing things against the wall to see what sticks," Thorpe says.