Over the last week, we’ve seen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young woman who defeated incumbent Democrat Representative Crowley, on TV outlining her socialist fantasies.
A new report ought to force Miss Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Sanders to explain how they will pay for Medicare for all. According to this report, it will be super-expensive:
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for all” plan would increase government health care spending by $32.6 trillion over 10 years, according to a study by a university-based libertarian policy center. …“It’s showing that if you are going to go in this direction, it’s going to cost the federal government $2.5 trillion to $3 trillion a year in terms of spending,” said Kenneth Thorpe [a health policy professor at Emory University]. …“Enacting something like ‘Medicare for all’ would be a transformative change in the size of the federal government,” said Charles Blahous, the study’s author. Blahous was a senior economic adviser to former President George W. Bush and a public trustee of Social Security and Medicare during the Obama administration. …Responding to the study, Sanders took aim at the Mercatus Center, which receives funding from the conservative Koch brothers. Koch Industries CEO Charles Koch is on the center’s board.
Play the Koch card! What else do these people but play this card or that card?
Indeed, the study was paid for the Koch brothers, but that does not mean that the results are wrong.
The study confirms what we’ve known for years, unless you are a liberal Democrat looking for a talking point. In other words, doubling all federal individual and corporate income taxes would not be enough.
But don’t expect Senator Sanders, or most in the media, to explain how he is going to pay for all of this.
Just another reason to go out and vote this November.
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