Let me just start with the “No we can’t because Republicans won’t let us” part. Bernie has won similar battles before as Burlington mayor and has achieved a lot with Republicans while in congress. I do not accept that visionless incrementalism is the only safe bet.
I already discussed a previous round of lies by Krugman here. David Dayen catches the first notable pack of lies, misrepresentations about Sanders’ financial reforms, by the “liberal” who claims to have a conscience, here. Krugman has a hissy fit about it here. That hissy fit is followed by a full 10 count smackdown by Yves Smith here.
Ignoring that he has already been counted out and exposed as cowardly lying sack of you know what, Krugman decides to again mislead. I haven’t been keeping track of how many lies this makes because I stopped reading him unless necessary.
Previous misleading comments by Krugman about Health Care:
To be harsh but accurate: the Sanders health plan looks a little bit like a standard Republican tax-cut plan, which relies on fantasies about huge supply-side effects to make the numbers supposedly add up. Only a little bit: after all, this is a plan seeking to provide health care, not lavish windfalls on the rich — and single-payer really does save money, whereas there’s no evidence that tax cuts deliver growth. Still, it’s not the kind of brave truth-telling the Sanders campaign pitch might have led you to expect.
I’ve heard similar claptrap before. Kenneth Thorpe said:
The analysis presented below however estimates that the average annual cost of the plan would be approximately $2.5 trillion per year creating an average of over a $1 trillion per year financing shortfall. To fund the program, payroll and income taxes would have to increase from a combined 8.4 percent in the Sanders plan to 20 percent while also retaining all remaining tax increases on capital gains, increased marginal tax rates, the estate tax and eliminating tax expenditures. The plan would create enormous winners and losers even with the more generous benefits with respect to what households and businesses pay today compared to what they would pay under a single payer plan. Overall, over 70 percent of working privately insured households would pay more under a fully funded single payer plan than they do for health insurance today.
Per this, here is the problem with what Thorpe said, beyond what might nicely be called “a difference of opinion” about what is outlandish and what is not, Thorpe did not treat Bernie’s plan with the same assumptions he had used to talk about other plans:
Thorpe's analysis rests on several incorrect, and occasionally outlandish, assumptions. Moreover, it is at odds with analyses of the costs of single-payer programs that he produced in the past, which projected large savings from such reform (see this study, for example, or this one).
Some of today’s misleading bits from Krugman:
I warned a while back that even Sanders wasn’t willing to level with voters about what his ideals would require — that, in particular, he was assuming unrealistic savings in order to gloss over the reality that quite a few middle-class Americans would be net losers from a transition to single payer. I’m not alone in raising such concerns, and not just about the health plan.
In the last sentence, Krugman mentions that he has raised concerns about things other than the health plan before. He isn’t including the part where he was shown to be lying about those other things. And his critique about unrealistic savings is the same lie Thorpe tried to maintain by using a different set of standards for Bernie’s plan than he used for other plans. Color me skeptical about whether the savings are unrealistic. As for the others that raised concerns, at least Krugman is admitting this time that only some, not all, serious people think Bernie’s plan is bogus. Here is the quote from before:
As far as I can tell, every serious progressive policy expert on either health care or financial reform who has weighed in on the primary seems to lean Hillary.
Let’s be clear, Krugman knowingly lied about Bernie’s Wall Street plan and got caught at it. Now his critiques of Bernie’s health care plan are less bombastic, at least in the part where he says others agree with him, but still extremely questionable. And as for those experts who agree with Krugman, they seem to be doing something similar to Thorpe. He is even mentioned as one of the experts and seems to be the one the others are relying on.
I know there are legitimate discussions to be had. But I am suspicious when people are being what seems to be unprofessional and using language chosen to belittle Bernie. It just sounds like a bunch of middle school bullies ganging up on the one who isn’t part of their little group. There is obviously a lot of intentional hackery going on. Let’s have real discussions and stop the childish fairy tale language.
Mr. Krugman’s insistence that single payer would be so costly to some that Bernie Sanders has to hide the true cost seems directly at odds with what he said in the video below. He even glowingly admits that one country went straight to single payer even without an intermediate step:
FInally, Krugman is not the only one who seems to have done a 180 on single payer now that Bernie is suggesting it. More here, specifically about Ezra Klein.
