Healthcare: "how will you pay for it?"

[bluewater]

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[Midnightwalk]

1. Why should we be debating it?

Healthcare is a winning issue for us. Locking our candidates into defending specifics such as promising to get rid of work insurance while the republicans have nothing to offer sounds like a bad idea to me.

Especially when the final bill entirely depends on what kind of margins we have in the house and senate. With thin margins what passes will be middle of the road.

Tell us aspirations and show off political skills in the primary. I want the person who is most convincing politically because that’s how we get more reforms.

I want universal healthcare but l think it will take multiple steps to get there. Not just because we’re fighting insurance company and republican scare tactics but because it is a massively complicated and expensive problem.

To get our costs under control means removing a trillion dollars of year in profit, jobs, income. That’s massive.

The fact that every other country does better should fuel optimism that we can do it too, but we shouldn’t under estimate the size of the problem getting it here.

[ritapria]

2. It is my understanding

That all the single payer countries in the Western World pay roughly 50% less per capita on health care expenses than we do in the United States …. For most people the savings from health care expenses would outweigh the increase in taxes necessary to finance MFA ..… The brilliant Senator from Massachusetts should be proud of her support for MFA and is more than capable of identifying those tax increases and making the compelling case that most people will come out ahead as we transition to MFA...……. The 30 million people who now have no health care insurance would have so under MFA … Under MFA.No one would go bankrupt because they became seriously ill ….. Under the current system , a half a million Americans are forced into bankruptcy if they become seriously ill ………………..

[Gothmog]

3. Societal Savings are not tax revenues and this plan will not work in the real world

Such a plan in theory may generate societal savings but such savings would not pay for a program. Governments can only spend tax revenues and/or borrowings. This study does not say how one would pay for such a program in the real world. I note that Prof. Krugman like the concepts of such a plan in theory but notes that taxes will have to be raised a great deal to pay for such a plan
Back in 2016, here is his position Prof. Krugman compares Sanders hoped for health care savings to the GOP tax cuts. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/19/weakened-at-bernies/?_r=0

On health care: leave on one side the virtual impossibility of achieving single-payer. Beyond the politics, the Sanders “plan” isn’t just lacking in detail; as Ezra Klein notes, it both promises more comprehensive coverage than Medicare or for that matter single-payer systems in other countries, and assumes huge cost savings that are at best unlikely given that kind of generosity. This lets Sanders claim that he could make it work with much lower middle-class taxes than would probably be needed in practice.

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.

Today, Prof. Krugman says that such a plan is feasible if you are willing to pay a great deal more in taxes
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/paul-krugman-explains-why-single-payer-health-care-entirely-achievable-us-and-how

If we went to government provision of all insurance, we’d pay more in taxes but less in premiums, and the overall burden of health spending would probably fall, because single-payer systems tend to be cheaper than market-based."

The amount of higher taxes are not quantified in this article by Krugman. To pay for any such plan will require massive tax hikes

Again sanders has utterly failed in his attempts to get Vermont to adopt his magical single payer plan because the state of Vermont cannot use hypothetical societal saving to pay for this plan. Even Krugman admits that much higher taxes are needed

[Act_of_Reparation]

4. Funny how no one asks that question when there's a country we need to bomb.

But when we're talking about decent medical care for everyone, we turn into total tightasses all of a sudden.

#ThingsThatMakeYouGoHmmmmmmm