What did SNL have to say about Sen. Warren’s plan to pay for “Medicare for All”?
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/kate-mckin…
There’s some good information there, but maybe we could delve a little more into the underlying facts.
Here’s Margot Sanger-Katz, a health care expert, on the underlying numbers (also attached, in case you have trouble with the NY Times pay wall):
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/upshot/elizabet…
You’ll notice that the price tag, approximately $20 trillion over 10 years, is about $10 trillion less than Sen. Sanders has calculated for his plan: roughly $30 trillion. The scale for this range of costs–$2 to $3 trillion per year–represents from a half to 3/4’s of current federal government spending. If you look at external estimates, some of them reach the level (~$4 trillion) of the entire federal government budget.
There’s more on the original “Medicare for All” than the latest version. Here are some helpful graphics–take some getting used to, due to the complexity–also from an earlier “The Upshot” (NY Times), also authored by Sanger-Katz, among others.
Let’s start with the baseline…
Here are the range of estimates. What I was talking about above ($30 trillion over 10 years) coincides with the roughly $3 trillion/year figure–what the Sanders campaign estimates (see the attached Rand analysis). But notice it’s a large range, which doesn’t even include Sen. Warren’s plan. If you take the largest estimate (Thorpe) below, it’s roughly double the cost of hers ($4 trillion annually vs. $2 trillion annually).
Here’s how that would change the spending by the current players (again using the roughly $3 trillion of Rand’s estimate):
Here’s some background about the estimates:
A lot to go through, but it gives us something to think/talk about. Here’s the link for the preceding images on the different estimates.
