Thursday, September 14, 2017

You can have anything you want if you don't care about the cost

This morning, Obamacare cheerleader Sarah Kliff wrote this piece on Vox: "Bernie Sanders's new Medicare-for-all plan, explained."  Here's the tl;dr "explanation":

1) It's going to be awesome
2) We have no idea how much it's going to cost

At no point does Kliff mention rationing of health care but at least she mentioned that single-payer crashed and burned in Vermont:
But Vermont’s single-payer dream fell apart when the state figured out how much it would need to raise taxes to finance its new system. Vermont abandoned the government-run plan after finding it would need to increase payroll taxes by 11.5 percent and income tax by 9 percent.
Unmentioned is that Colorado and California also ran screaming from single-payer plans when the price tag was revealed.  Perhaps sensing that she had overreached in her earlier "explanation", Kliff followed up in the afternoon with "How much is that Medicare-for-all plan in the window?"  Oh, good, we're going to find out the cost of Sanders' plan.

Or not:
Sanders certainly offers a wide array of financing options, and you can read through all them right here. What makes them difficult to evaluate, however, is that we don't know how much he expects his single-payer health plan to cost.
What was the point of these articles, Sarah, other than to keep up the drumbeat for a single-payer plan that will never see the light of day and/or fill your article quota at Vox?

1 comment:

Roger Bournival said...

"But Vermont’s single-payer dream fell apart "

One word conveys a lot of meaning. Where's Anonymous to once again defend the indefensible?