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What About the Displaced Insurance Workers?
12.03.2018
Excerpt: Medicare for All Is Even Better Than You Thought
A key feature of Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All Act is the just transition it promises to the more than 800,000 private insurance industry workers who will be displaced.
While often treated as a perk intended to boost popularity, the PERI study proves that it is in fact a necessary policy component of the bill. Without offering generous benefits to workers from the abolished private insurance industry, the impressive macroeconomic benefits of the plan could be squandered due to a rapid rise in unemployment and income loss.
The Sanders bill provides a broad promise to guarantee assistance to displaced workers. The PERI bill elaborates on this promise with three concrete proposals: pension fund guarantees for all impacted workers; support for near-retirement workers, including 100 percent wage replacement for multiple years; and support for displaced workers, including job training and relocation support and total wage replacement for one year.
This fairly generous approach will cost $61.5 billion per year of transition. As we’ve already seen, Medicare for All can be expected to operate with a $30 billion surplus, which could be used to cover half of these needed funds. The PERI study proposes that the rest be raised through a 0.6 percent increase in the net-worth tax.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/12/medicare-for-all-study-peri-sanders