According to a new study done by the Mercatus Center, a libertarian-based Koch policy center, Senator Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” plan would cost the United States over $32 trillion in taxpayer dollars over the next 10 years and would more than double our national debt.
And that's a “conservative estimate."
“Doubling all currently projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections would be insufficient to finance the added federal costs of the plan. It is likely that the actual cost of M4A would be substantially greater than these estimates, which assume significant administrative and drug cost savings under the plan,” states the study.
Publicizing medical health care insurance would drastically decrease reimbursement to medical professionals by 40 percent compared to private insurers and was “estimated to add $435 billion to national healthcare spending.”
The study points out that under a Medicare for All system, utilization of health services would drastically increase, particularly in three ways.
It would provide insurance to all uninsured, it would include dental, vision, and hearing care for all participants, and the plan’s requirement that “no cost-sharing, including deductibles, coinsurance, copayments, or similar charges, be imposed on an individual” would increase utilization as well -- a measure the Vermont senator thinks is just fine.
“If every major country on earth can guarantee health care to all, and achieve better health outcomes, while spending substantially less per capita than we do, it is absurd for anyone to suggest that the United States cannot do the same,” Sanders told the AP.
“This grossly misleading and biased report is the Koch brothers response to the growing support in our country for a ‘Medicare for all’ program,” he added, referencing the Mercatus report.
ThinkProgress hailed the fact that despite the obvious economic destruction of such a plan, prescription drug costs and streamlined administrative costs would save $846 billion and $1.6 trillion respectively over the next decade (savings that do next to nothing to offset the larger spending costs).
The study’s based its findings on a hypothetical timeline in which a Medicare-For-All policy is implemented in 2018. A federal policy would be quite complicated and even when this kind of policy has been implemented on a state level (like in Sanders’ home state of Vermont) there have been some serious obstacles.