Saturday, November 2, 2019

Liz Warren's $52 Trillion "Medicare For All"

Yesterday, 1 November, Lizzie Warren (D., Uranus) finally unveiled her budgetary numbers for her often-talked-about-but-never-with-numbers medicare for all plan.  It will cost $52 trillion dollars "and, she claims, will not require any middle-class tax increases."

As they say in the UK: go on, pull the other one - it's got bells on.

$52 Trillion might be real; at least it's quite a bit more than the $34 trillion advanced by The Urban Institute and covered here on October 18.  It's the part about not requiring middle-class tax increases that I think is just utter nonsense. 

Let's say, with no particular reason, that this is $5.2 Trillion per year for 10 years, and not increasing exponentially from nothing in its first year.  The current federal budget is about $4 trillion per year, and revenue is closer to $3 trillion leaving a deficit of just over $1 trillion.  Spending would then go to $9.2 t per year and the deficit to $6.2 trillion/year.  The current national debt just crossed $23 trillion at the much lower yearly increases we've had for a couple of years.  Going from $1.1/year to $6.2/year is going to really shock the bond markets.  Something's got to give.

Remember part of her plan is to outlaw the medical insurance industry.  According to some numbers I looked up last time, that industry alone is about $1 Trillion/year in revenue and 621,000 people's careers.  All of those jobs will be lost.  Add that to the economic havoc that will ensue.

By convenient coincidence, the Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget did an analysis of how to pay for it on October 28th, three days before the release of better numbers.  Yahoo Financial News covers the story:
Warren justifies many of her programs by saying all it would take is “two cents” from the wealthy. That’s a reference to her 2% wealth tax on ultra-millionaires. But Medicare for All would be so expensive that if you taxed top earners at 100%—that’s right, if you took all the income of couples earning more than $408,000 per year—you’d still fall far short. And everybody getting taxed at 100% would obviously stop working.

Okay, that won’t do it. So what will? CRFB outlined a variety of options. A 42% national sales tax (known as a valued-added tax) would generate about $3 trillion in revenue. But it would destroy the consumer spending that’s the backbone of the U.S. economy. A tax of that magnitude would be like 42% inflation, wrecking consumer budgets and the many companies that depend on them, from Walmart and Amazon to your local car dealer.

Other options include a 32% payroll tax split between employers and workers or a 25% income surtax on everybody. Or, the government could cut 80% of spending on everything but health care, which would include highways, airports and the Pentagon. Or here’s a good one: Just borrow the money and quadruple Washington’s annual deficits.

The best idea might be charging every enrollee in the new program $7,500 per year, so they’d be paying directly for the coverage they’re getting. Some people pay more than that now for health care, by purchasing insurance outright or sacrificing pay raises in exchange for employer coverage. It would still be a nifty trick to propose that to voters.

The upside to these impossibly draconian scenarios is that nobody would pay anything for health care, except in the $7,500 example. And it’s possible that Medicare for All would cover health care for more people at a lower total cost than we spend now, meaning the average cost per person would go down. The problem is transitioning from what we have now to whatever Medicare for all would be. And it’s a giant problem, like crossing the Mississippi River without a bridge or a boat. The other side might look great but you’ll die before you get there.
My first reaction was to to say, "ain't gonna happen," although I did it with my fingers crossed.  I'd hope that there's enough people in the gubmint that aren't full tilt crazy.  Then I remember the prominence of modern monetary theory in the Evil party these days. 

If this twit gets her way, it's game over.  Economic collapse.




5 comments:

  1. Medicaid, at least in Michigan, is "vendored" through the exact same insurance companies and medical conglomerates that sell private insurance polices. You can have a Blue Cross Blue Shield Medicade card. You can have an Alliance Health Medicade card or a McClaren or one of about twelve other vendors.

    Contrary to what is implied, it does not make the system more efficient by cutting out layers of middlemen. The vendor reimburses the medical supplier. The State reimburses the vendor. The Feds reimburse the State.

    Every link has waste, multiple billings for single procedures and fragmentation of responsibility.

    The image that single payer will reduce waste is an illusion. It is a pile of turds covered with chocolate frosting, sprinkles and unicorns.

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  2. Gary North said his high school teacher in 1955 demonstrated calculations that Social Security would go bankrupt. Medical details such as lifespans and medical care have not improved so much that the projection made in 1955 became substantially wrong by 2019.

    Plan now for what you are going to do for a living after the Republican+Democrat uniparty goes Venezuela with the economics supported by mainstream politics. North America will still be a gorgeous landmass. There will still be a 200 year reserve of fossil fuels in the ground, 2,000 years if you react the Thorium in the coal.

    Remember that recent news event about somebody destroying an Saudi oil refinery with drones, cheaply and without risk to soldiers? That is the near future of smaller-than-state military/political conflict.

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  3. If you look at voters today, some have been educated by the MSM, some have been educated in the educational system to believe in the utopian view of socialism/communism as a governmental state. They are ignorant of the atrocities of the ChiComs, the USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela et al; the list is far too long.

    Once we hit the tipping point where there are more of the "free stuff" people versus those of us who work hard and value the freedoms of America, our Republic will be lost.

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  4. Fauxcahontas' IQ is akin to a retarded child that thinks you could make elevators fly higher if only you added more buttons at the top of the control plate.

    But relax about the loss of those 621,000 medical insurance jobs.
    They'd be more than offset by the 2,000,000 new government employees necessary to administer the system (until it went all Venezuela/Zimbabwe), the doubling of the U.S. Treasury roster to work the extra shifts and print all the new Weimar currency, and by the tripling of the Secret Service personnel roster to prevent the 20-50 assassination attempts on President Warren >ptui!< that would occur daily, 24/7/365, until someone hit the jackpot.

    Also, point of order:
    That $52T?
    Over what actual timespan?

    Medicare-For-All doesn't end in ten years, because people live 70-85 years. So I suspect the $52T is the one-time ramp up cost from seniors to literally everyone, with annual costs thereafter to be that much again, or vastly more, forever.

    So forget amortizing $52T over a decade. That's economic handwaving and mumbo-jumbo.

    This is likely to require taxing every American from broke to super-wealthy at 500% of current middle-class tax rates forever, which is to say everyone, from cradle to grave, will be working in the mines just to get their daily protein bar, fat pill, and energy drink, until they die of overwork and exhaustion, like camp workers in Treblinka circa 1944.

    Maybe the Secret Service should think long and hard about their job priorities long before such a catastrophic election.
    They're going to have a busy day every day if Lieawatha gets any electoral traction.
    She's a threat to a free republic, and life itself.
    And a thorough-going and utter economic moron.

    The Mussolinis, Qaddaffis, Saddams, et al would point out that such asinine behavior has a shelf life, and a hard freshness expiration date, and tends to end abruptly, up against a wall.

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  5. Also, depending upon the good sense of the government branches to rein in her stupidity is generally called whistling past the graveyard.
    How'd that work out with ObozoCare?

    But the Warren Campaign should move to adopt the slogan
    If you like your paycheck, you can keep your paycheck,
    hearkening as it does to the exact same sort of promises we got last time around, from an even bigger fraud with an even smaller brain.

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