Politics Under Sanders, income and jobs would soar, economist says

Children aren't truly Americans until they vote Republican.

Or after they're convicted of a felony.

 

hahahahahaha



For the second time.

I "simply responded his plan is $.6T short."

hahahaahaha

 

Why not include a working link to the entire article?

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...ch-would-bernie-sanders-health-care-plan-cos/

 

This is the second time I posted that article. I figure if words don't do it for him, maybe pictures will.

Also, it's a screenshot of my previous post. He said I simply responded the plan was $.6T short. No I didn't. I posted politifact's math, the link, and even more good bits.

 

All of his new taxes, premiums, etc., are $.6T short.

"Sanders says his system would make up for that shortfall by trimming costs, as the government would have more leverage to negotiate with health providers."

Waste, fraud, and abuse. LOL. Always promised, never delivered.

 

Step 1: click on the link and read
Step 2: come back and admit you don't know what you're talking about.

Look for these words:

That’s still $599 billion short of what the country actually spent on health care in 2013 ($949 billion in premiums and $325 billion for out-of-pocket expenses, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services).

Sanders says his system would make up for that shortfall by trimming costs, as the government would have more leverage to negotiate with health providers.

You need it in crayon?

 

http://www.economist.com/news/unite...es-would-sink-sanders-economic-plan-vote-what

Mr Sanders knows that soaking the rich can get him only so far. He is also banking on health-care costs tumbling. Health spending per person is two-and-a-half times the average for the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. The immense bargaining power of a government buyer could help to control waste. Medicare, government-funded health insurance for the over-65s, already provides care at a lower cost than private insurers. Mr Sanders predicts $6.3 trillion of savings over a decade.

That looks like wishful thinking. A costing of Mr Sanders’s plans by Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University, using more conservative assumptions, found that the plan was underfunded by nearly $1.1 trillion (or 6% of GDP) per year. If Mr Thorpe is right, higher taxes will be required to make the sums add up. In 2014 Mr Sanders’ own state, Vermont, abandoned a plan for a single-payer system on the basis that the required tax rises would be too great.

(There's that pesky $.6T figure again - $6.3T over 10 years).

 

http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/03/pf/taxes/bernie-sanders-health-plan/

A new analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budgetsuggests that the plan may increase deficits by at least $3 trillion, and that's assuming Sanders correctly estimated the cost.

In a worst-case scenario, if the campaign underestimated the plan's costs, it could add as much as $14 trillion, according to the CRFB.

The main issue: The tax hikes may not raise as much as Sanders is counting on.

For example, Sanders has proposed taxing capital gains and dividends as ordinary income. Under the Sanders plan, that would be as much as 62%: The new 52% top income tax rate he's proposed, plus the 3.8% Medicare surtax and the 6.2% Social Security tax that Sanders would apply to income over $250,000.

The Sanders campaign estimates this change could raise $920 billion.

But the CRFB noted that the Joint Committee on Taxation, an official scorekeeper for Congress on tax measures, and others have asserted that a capital gains rate above 32% or so could end up reducing capital gains revenue, since investors would choose to hold on to more of their investments rather than sell them and pay the tax.

The CRFB estimates do not include the potential economic effects of Sanders' higher income tax rates. But if they did, the outlook could worsen.

 

http://www.vox.com/2016/1/28/10858644/bernie-sanders-kenneth-thorpe-single-payer

In a phone call, Gunnels explained the $1.1 trillion gap. It comes down to five factors:

• Sanders assumes $438 billion more per year in administrative savings than Thorpe; Thorpe assumes that total health spending will fall by 4.7 percent because single-payer is simpler to administer, while the campaign has anticipated a reduction of 16 percent (changed in a later email to 13 percent).
• Sanders assumes $324 billion more per year in prescription drug savings than Thorpe does. Thorpe argues that this is wildly implausible. "In 2014 private health plans paid a TOTAL of $132 billion on prescription drugs and nationally we spent $305 billion," he writes in an email. "With their savings drug spending nationally would be negative." (Emphasis mine.) The Sanders camp revised the number down to $241 billion when I pointed this out.
• Sanders assumes $216 billion more per year in savings because Thorpe thinks eliminating copayments and deductibles will lead to people using a lot more health care (10 percent more, to be exact), and Sanders's camp is more skeptical (they assume 6 percent more).
• Sanders assumes $160 billion per year in savings relative to Thorpe because, they argue, he includes elective procedures like plastic surgery, which single-payer wouldn't cover. Thorpe disputes this: "Cosmetic surgery, really? That's $12 billion a year and in the second decimal of rounding." In other words: There's no way excluding plastic surgery can give you $160 billion of savings.
• Sanders assumes that states will pay $100 billion more per year in Medicaid and SCHIP spending than Thorpe does, because they think states will keep paying in the exact same amount they currently pay into those programs. Thorpe is skeptical, noting that in the Supreme Court's 2012 Obamacare ruling, it "said in essence you cannot force states to make spending on a expansion of Medicaid —how is the world can you expect states to contribute toward the costs of programs that are eliminated?"

Which is all to say that the gap between Thorpe and Sanders is the gap between an economist who is optimistic that single-payer can save some money and a campaign optimistic that it can save a huge amount of money. "Their savings numbers are — well, politely said — simply wrong," Thorpe writes in an email.

They're also apparently malleable. When I pointed out that the yearly savings numbers they were presenting on prescription drugs were literally impossible, the Sanders camp revised the number to $241 billion — huge and arguably implausible but not larger than total annual spending on prescription drugs. A follow-up email also revised down the assumed administrative savings from 16 percent to 13 percent and the savings on utilization up from $216 billion to a whopping $660 billion.

"They are just throwing things against the wall to see what sticks," Thorpe says.

 

I posted the link at least twice. Just as you are wrong about Sly being the only one to post the link, you are wrong on all the rest. Now you have three or four new links to click on, and excerpts, to misinterpret, claim I didn't post the links, and lie about what's there.

 

http://fiscalfactcheck.crfb.org/analysis-of-the-sanders-single-payer-offsets/

Overall, based on our rough estimates and excluding most potential interactions, it appears that Sen. Sanders’s proposal would raise $10.7 trillion of revenue.2 Depending on whether one uses Sen. Sanders’s estimates of the cost of his single-payer plan or Thorpe’s estimates, this means his plan would cost between $3 trillion and $14 trillion, net of offsets, over a decade.

...

Sen. Sanders has shown a commitment to paying for the cost of his single-payer plan, but the numbers at the moment don’t appear to add up. We look forward to hearing more details about the health care side of the plan and hope that he will adjust his policies so that the plan doesn’t add to the deficit.

 

http://theweek.com/articles/603313/how-progressive-critique-bernie-sanders-health-care-plan

There's basically no evidence to suggest single-payer can drop preexisting cost levels. To do that, the government would have to massively and rapidly cut the income enjoyed by hundreds of powerful hospitals and companies, and hundreds of thousands of doctors and providers. This would cause unprecedented economic upheaval, borne primarily by powerful upper class voting blocks and interests.

It would also force the issue of what drugs and procedures to cover. Single-payer advocates focus on holding down costs by telling suppliers "no" more often, in order to tell consumers "no" less. Which isn't wrong, but there's a limit to how far that idea can take you, because telling suppliers and consumers "no" are really flip sides of the same coin.

To bargain a health care provider down to a lower cost, you have to ultimately be willing to walk away from the purchase — which under a single-payer system means the government decides to simply not provide Americans with that particular medication or treatment or whatever. That is, to put it mildly, a touchy subject. Even if you gave the government bargaining power over all health care purchases in the economy (like France and Canada basically do) you can't escape that basic reality. Sanders' proposal elides all of this, describing incredibly generous coverage with no cost sharing at all.

This is all how problems of economic distribution become problems of political power: A movement that could make all this happen would be a movement with the power to do virtually anything. It would be the end of the fight, not the beginning.

To get its numbers, Sanders' plan assumes that introducing a single-payer system would immediately create a massive slowdown in health care spending, squeezing the per person cost level until it's basically even with Canadian levels within a decade. It's a remarkably optimistic notion that stretches the far bleeding edge of the possible.

Assuming Sanders is right, the new taxes (and likely deficit increases) required would certainly be economically do-able. But politically it would take Democratic majorities far beyond those of Obama in 2008. If he's wrong, the costs of the program would rocket far higher.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-bernie-sanderss-health-care-plan-leaves-out

Take the question of cost. Although the plan is called Medicare-for-All, in fact it’s much more generous than Medicare. It would give all Americans dental, vision, hearing, mental-health, and long-term care, massively expanding both the number of people who have insurance and the range of treatment they can get. It would also eliminate co-pays and deductibles. “As a patient, all you need to do is go to the doctor and show your insurance card,” the plan says. All things being equal, these changes would significantly increase the amount that Americans spend on health care (currently around three trillion dollars a year). Yet the plan also calls for trillions of dollars less to be spent on health care over the next ten years. In other words, Sanders is promising more coverage and more treatment, for a dramatically lower cost. How would he pull this off?

The answer in the document is vague: “Reforming our health care system, simplifying our payment structure and incentivizing new ways to make sure patients are actually getting better health care will generate massive savings.” The general idea seems to be that moving to the single-payer model will lead to a huge drop in administrative costs, and will also allow the government to use its leverage to drive down the prices of drugs and medical devices. According to an analysis that the campaign released by Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, costs in the new system would also rise much more slowly than they do today. Sanders claims that, all told, his plan will save ten trillion dollars across ten years.

Neither the plan nor Friedman explains where those ten trillion dollars would come from. “The pleasure of being an academic is I can just spell things out and leave the details to others,” Friedman told the Times. “The details very quickly get very messy.”

Messy, LOL

 

HuffPost

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-health_us_56b25e8fe4b04f9b57d83008

More Signs Of Fuzzy Math In The Bernie Sanders Health Plan
Another week, another report questioning the Sanders proposal's basic assumptions.

There’s new reason to think the numbers in the Bernie Sanders health care plan don’t add up.

On Wednesday, the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, released an analysis of Sanders’ proposal to replace existing health insurance arrangements with a single, government-run plan that would look something like Medicare.

Sanders has said that his plan would pay for itself, partly by making the U.S. health care system more efficient and partly by raising revenue through a series of new taxes. In the end, Sanders has promised, the vast majority of Americans would actually be better off financially, paying less in taxes under his program than they would pay in premiums plus out-of-pocket expenses under the current system.

...

Like most analyses that circulate during presidential campaigns, this one is rough. And the Sanders campaign is challenging the report by assailing the credibility of the source -- something it also did last week, when a prominent health care economist released a similarly critical analysis.

But if the findings from this new report are even in the right ballpark, then either the benefits Sanders has promised would have to be smaller, the taxes for the plan would have to be higher, or the program as a whole would create huge new deficits.

...

The report is the second in two weeks to scrutinize the arithmetic of Sanders' health plan. The previous report, from Emory University professor Kenneth Thorpe, suggests that estimates of health care savings in the Sanders plan are even more off the mark. Among the reasons: Such severe reductions in hospital payments would cause closures and shortages that neither the industry nor the public would tolerate.

...

But the center's analysts have a reputation for intellectually sound work. They are relying on the same theories about tax policy that economists at the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation use. And they are hardly the only respected experts raising questions about the assumptions in the Sanders plan -- and whether those assumptions are realistic.