From Politico:
“Bernie Sanders has called for a roughly 9-percent tax hike on middle-class families just to cover his health-care plan,” said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon, referring to legislation Sanders introduced in 2013, “and simple math dictates he'll need to tax workers even more to pay for the rest of his at least $18-20 trillion agenda. If you are truly concerned about raising incomes for middle-class families, the last thing you should do is cut their take-home pay right off the bat by raising their taxes.”
Lost in this assessment is the observation that any tax hike accompanying the implementation of a single-payer system would effectively replace the private health insurance premiums we have now. But that’s really important because one of the main arguments for a single-payer system is that the money we would spend on health insurance premiums through taxes toward a national health insurance system would be less than the money we are spending on private health insurance premiums right now. Look no further than Medicare for examples of cost efficiency beating out what private insurers offer now:
The average annual per-capita spending growth rate through 2019 is projected at 3.1 percent for Medicare, compared with 4.9 percent for private insurance plans, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The 3.1 percent projection even includes higher payments to doctors as part of a long-term solution to the long-running problem of the sustainable growth rate (SGR) used under current law to control Medicare spending on physician services.
The 3.1 percent projection also is smaller than the 3.7 percent annual growth in gross domestic product for that period projected by the Congressional Budget Office.
Although we hear plenty about fraud and abuse in Medicare - which is a legitimate area of concern - the program is dramatically more efficient than private insurance. Medicare spent just 1.4 percent of every dollar on administrative overhead, even including money spent to fight fraud and abuse, compared with 25 percent overhead in private plans, according to Richard Kaplan, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law who specializes in elder law matters.
Remember that private insurers devote quite a bit of spending on advertising and marketing, even if the Affordable Care Act mandates that 85% of collected health insurance premiums must go to health care expenses.
And then of course, in a market-driven health insurance economy, you’ll have healthy people moving to new health insurance plans to save money, but sick people must remain on their current plans if they’re to retain their physicians. This leads to vastly different risk pools and cost inequities (SOURCE). This scenario is precluded when the system is designed to cover everyone.
The deceptive framing that Brian Fallon is pushing is very similar to the deceptive WSJ piece touting the $18 trillion price tag of Bernie’s proposals, which was basically trying to elicit a WTF response from conservatives. But as Matthew Yglesias pointed out, Bernie’s health care plan would actually save money relative to now even if it’s funded through payroll taxes!
Sanders is proposing to have the federal government pay for everyone's doctor visits, hospital stays, and medical procedures, just the way it currently does for people over the age of 65. Obviously that's an expensive undertaking. But right now private health insurance plans are projected to spend $14 trillion over the next 10 years, and people are forecast to incur $4 trillion in out-of-pocket expenses. Turning $18 trillion of private spending into $15 trillion of government spending while also expanding access to insurance would actually be an incredibly impressive trick. If you financed it with a broad-based payroll tax (the way Social Security is financed), people with job-based insurance plans wouldn't even notice the difference — today's insurance premium line on your pay stub would become a tax line.
If the Clinton campaign wants to come at Bernie’s health care proposals, it should stick to arguments about political viability (even if I don’t agree with them). Because the current framing the campaign is using is dishonest quite frankly.
And on that note, I was amused by this tweet from the Sanders campaign:
The answer: Hillary Clinton in 1994.
...what I think would happen if there is not health care reform this year, and if, for whatever reason, the Congress doesn’t pass health care reform, I believe, and I may be to totally off base on this, but I believe that by the year 2000 we will have a single payer system. I don’t think it’s — I don’t even think it’s a close call politically.
I think the momentum for a single payer system will sweep the country. And regardless of the referendum outcome in California, it will be such a huge popular issue in the sense of populist issue that even if it’s not successful the first time, it will eventually be.
It will eventually be. Would go faster if Clinton wasn’t currently part of the opposition I’d wager.