Economist Breaks It Down for Democrats, Explains Sheer Impossibility of 'Medicare for All'
“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.” That quote is attributed to satirist P.J. O’Rourke, but it just might end up being disturbingly prescient.
Not satisfied with already turning healthcare on its head through Obamacare, liberals are now floating their next plan for America: universal healthcare. A more accurate term is probably socialized medicine, but the left is trying to sell the idea to voters by dubbing it “Medicare for All.”
The idea is simple, at least at a glance. Take taxpayer-funded health coverage such as Medicare and just expand it, until every American has the same type of program as many senior citizens today.
But as conservatives know all too well, reality can get complicated. There is strong evidence that the latest liberal scheme would be riddled with problems — and one of the most troubling is the price tag.
During recent testimony in front of the House Rules Committee on Tuesday, respected economist Charles Blahous of George Mason University burst the Democrats’ bubble by delivering some harsh calculations about socialized medicine.
“Medicare for All would add somewhere between $32.6 trillion and $38.8 trillion in new federal budget costs over the first 10 years,” the economics expert explained to lawmakers in Washington.
For comparison, the entire U.S. national debt is currently $22 trillion, with no real plan on how to pay it back anytime soon.
“The $32.6 trillion estimate is a lower-bound estimate,” Blahous continued. “It essentially assumes every cost-containment provision in the bill saves as much as possible. If instead things play out more consistently with historical trends, the new federal costs would be closer to $38.8 trillion.”
Most people can barely imagine a million dollars, let alone a billion or a trillion. In order to help legislators — and the public — wrap their heads around the massive cost of “Medicare for All,” the economist put it in terms that should make every taxpayer’s jaw drop.
“Obviously, such enormous numbers are very difficult to grasp,” he said. “We’re talking about 11 to 13 percent of our GDP in 2022, rising to 13 to 15 percent of GDP in 2031 being added to the federal ledger, and we simply do not have historical experience with permanent government expansions of this size.”
His next statement should provide a much-needed reality check for liberal socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“So to provide a sense of the magnitude, the study notes that doubling all currently projected federal individual and corporate income taxes would be insufficient to finance even the lower bound estimate of $32.6 trillion,” Blahous said, according to Independent Journal Review.
Re-read that sentence again, because it’s vitally important. Even if every income tax in America were doubled, a move that would cripple the economy, there still wouldn’t be enough money to pay for the liberal pipe dream.
Not that it will make much difference: Far-left Democrats seem to be little interested in the facts and numbers behind their proposals, but appear to be throwing any ideas available at the wall in the hopes that one will stick.
That’s exactly what we already saw with Ocasio-Cortez’s fantastical “Green New Deal,” which included such wild proposals as renovating every building in America and ending air travel to make way for trains. When pressed for details about how she intends to pay for such schemes, the former bartender repeatedly dodges the question.
Liberalism as practiced by figures like JFK and even Bill Clinton used to mean wanting government to be a bit bigger and more helpful, while still being conscious of economic limitations. Today, all deference to math and reality seems to have been tossed out the window by the left.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
