Turns out Bernie overestimated revenue from his single-payer offsets, falling $3T+ short: https://t.co/RKsoIcFpoz pic.twitter.com/bAn2q9H58H
— Loren Adler (@LorenAdler) February 3, 2016
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget ran the numbers on the Sanders’ healthcare plan and its financing and depending on the assumptions, the Sanders plan is either $3 trillion dollars short over 10 years or $14 trillion dollars short over ten years compared to what the campaign is claiming.
That Sen. Sanders has shown a commitment to paying for his new initiatives and has proposed specific concrete changes to do so is quite encouraging. However, by our rough estimates, his proposed offsets would cover only three-quarters of his claimed cost, leaving a $3 trillion shortfall over ten years. Even that discrepancy, though, assumes that the campaign’s estimate of the cost of their single-payer plan is correct. An alternateanalysis by respected health economist Kenneth Thorpe of Emory University finds a substantially higher cost, which would leave Sanders’s plan $14 trillion short. The plan would also increase the top tax rate beyond the point where most economists believe it could continue generating more revenue and thus could result in even larger deficits as a result of slowed economic growth.
Sanders is not running in the Republican primary where the ability to propose programs with multi-trillion dollar piles of bullshit is an asset. His campaign should respond to CRFB and Thorpe’s cost estimates on a non-ad-hominem basis to explain why their estimate that single payer is a net neutral fiscal move instead of a massive budget buster.