Thanks once again to The Other McCain for the Rule Five links!
The daffy old socialist from Vermont is once more up to his usual shenanigans, this time proposing a universal health care scheme estimated to cost more than the entire Imperial budget. Excerpt:
Not only has Sanders’ office not done its own serious accounting for the Senator’s signature policy objective, the maligned “Koch-funded” piece of propaganda…closely reflected other academic estimates of single payer’s price tag. Indeed, in our post yesterday, we cited a study by the left-leaning Urban Institute that ran the math and came up with a nearly identical cost projection — via the Washington Post:
The government’s price tag would be astonishing. When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proposed a “Medicare for all” health plan in his presidential campaign, the nonpartisan Urban Institute figured that it would raise government spending by $32 trillion over 10 years, requiring a tax increase so huge that even the democratic socialist Mr. Sanders did not propose anything close to it.
When right-leaning and left-leaning think tanks produce strikingly similar calculations, perhaps we should sit up, pay attention, and take the results seriously. As for the “savings” canard, the Urban Institute analysis 
guesstimated that BernieCare would increase overall costs by more than $6 trillion over a decade, so how can Sanders claim that the Mercatus numbers point to a multi-trillion-dollar decrease? Economist Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute, an expert on these matters, explains the context: “The claims of lower total economy-wide health savings only [materialize] because Blahous charitably accepted the Bernie assumption that we can lower all payment rates to Medicare payment rates,” Riedl tells me.
Here’s the conclusion:
When Blahous applied his institutional knowledge to the math, Sanders’ fanciful savings evaporated, and a higher tab of roughly $4 trillion over 
ten years emerged. And notice — again — the relatively similar projections from both Blahous and the Urban Institute. Riedl also notes that both entities’ analysis align closely with extrapolations from state-level estimates from Vermont and California, where single-payer schemes were abandoned by left-wing legislatures due to totally untenable costs. We mentioned in our breakdown of Ocasio Cortez’s magical thinking that she did not propose anything even remotely approaching a plan to pay for all of this.
Well, there’s are a couple of obvious answers:
We’ll just add a bunch of zeroes to the currency, and it will all work out. (The Venezuela solution.)- We’ll just borrow the money! (The U.S. Congress solution.)
The usual answer to this involves the iron fist of government being employed to slash prices at gunpoint. That results in fewer providers entering into medical career fields; it results in fewer facilities, it results in fewer companies manufacturing devices and drugs; it results in rationing. See the formerly-Great Britian’s National Health Service for an example.
Our own Colorado voted down a single-payer solution. California’s loony legislature abandoned a similar initiative after seeing the numbers. Ditto for Vermont. And, to be honest, the daffy old socialist from Vermont’s idea isn’t going anywhere at the Imperial level, either. He will keep on campaigning for it; his self-awareness is so low that he’s handing the GOP a gift every time he speaks on the topic.
Not that that’s anything new for him.
