via The Washington Examiner by Philip Wegmann
Eventually, someone was going to do the math and then progressive Democrats would have to explain their support for a program that would eat up almost all federal revenue each year.
Now, a new study from the libertarian Mercatus Center finds that the Medicare for All plan introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., would increase government spending on healthcare by $32.6 trillion over the next decade assuming it is successful in most of its stated goals. That’s about $3.2 trillion each year, an ungodly amount compared to the $3.3 trillion the federal government takes in annually in revenue. If hospitals and doctors refuse to accept less money for their services, the plan could prove far more expensive, or else the quality of care could suffer dramatically, or else there will be some result combining those two undesirable outcomes.
Sanders couldn’t refute that economic analysis when asked to defend his plan. He could only quibble with the authors by maligning the Mercatus report as “the Koch brothers response to the growing support in our country for a ‘Medicare for All’ program.”
This simply won’t do. One, because other more liberal think tanks, like the Urban Institute, have made similar projections. And two, because already a third of the Democratic Party has endorsed the idea without actually taking a good hard look at what it would cost. When asked whether he had his own numbers, even Sanders admitted his office never bothered to commission a cost analysis.