[morcheeba]

This article turned me off the WSJ: http://www.wsj.com/articles/price-tag-of-bernie-sanders-prop...

18 Trillion -- yikes! It's not until the 5th paragraph that we find out that this includes health insurance and that me and my employer wouldn't have to shell out for that anymore. Does it save me money overall? A question not asked. But they do make a big deal about that number and how alarmed they are at it, even if it it's designed to save money.

[mtanski]

Bernie supporters turn me off to Bernie. I happen to agree with the guy on many (but, not all) problems facing our country and it's people.

But instead on HN, my Facebook & any story about Bernie. His supporters automatically try to counter any kind of scrutiny of the guy, his positions & his plans. For crying out loud The guy is running for president, he's not a saint and he deserves every bit of scrutiny.

[nitrogen]

But instead on HN, my Facebook & any story about Bernie. His supporters automatically try to counter any kind of scrutiny of the guy, his positions & his plans. For crying out loud The guy is running for president, he's not a saint and he deserves every bit of scrutiny.

Not to justify it, but it kind of makes sense. Many of Bernie's supporters are finding a reason to participate in politics for the first time, or feeling cared about by the system for the first time, and when something threatens their new champion they feel like they themselves are threatened.

This definitely speaks to a wider phenomenon in society, where a lot of people had lost hope and are just now finding some, whether through Trump or Sanders. Taking that bit of hope away could be very destabilizing. There's also some interesting human nature in there, regarding conflating one's identity with one's beliefs.

[ericd]

The point isn't that he's being scrutinized, the point is that that line of argument in the article is totally disingenuous, to the point of being almost a smear.

[andrewflnr]

What argument are you thinking of? GP didn't mention one in particular.

[ericd]

That Single Payer would increase healthcare spending by 18T, rather than just moving it around, and increase taxes, while ignoring the part where there's a corresponding decrease in private healthcare spending. The central hook of that WSJ article.

[ryanlol]

Assuming the 18T figure is correct, how could you just "move it around"?

[MagnumOpus]

Putting it simply, the amount that you pay would be moved from a line item on your pay slip called "private health insurance" paid to Aetna or whoever, to a line item called "medicare contribution" or "national health service contribution" paid to the IRS.

On the back end, rather than Aetna shelling out money to the hospital so that you can get treated for free or cheaply, the government would do so - just like it already does for Medicare and VA.

So it is not $18tn additional burden - it is a similar burden, but not going through the hands of private insurers who take a cut.

[nitrogen]

I think idea is that the money currently spent by employers and individuals on insurance and direct medical costs would instead be spent on healthcare taxes, and that the current private spending is approximately enough to cover public healthcare if redirected.

[hartpuff]

I think fanaticism is to be expected when it comes to politics, particularly online, where it's easy to become intransigent or immoderate, and while it's irritating, it's hardly something you can or should blame the candidate for.

[vadym909]

He's not a Saint? Didn't he just have fly over to meet the Pope over the weekend? Who does that?

[greendestiny]

I think in the aftermath of the US election cycle you'll probably view that differently. Replacing personal and business expenditure with government expenditure is a complicated equation, but Sanders plan absolutely required raising that amount of new taxes. It was probably more of a problem for the Sander campaign that more media wasn't more alarmed by his proposals, I don't think anyone much took them seriously. At least the WSJ was taking his proposals seriously in that article.

[mtgx]

Although that was "damaging" because many quoted it, it wasn't nearly as biased was Washington Post was when it did this:

http://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories...

[eanzenberg]

More importantly, the current deficit is ~1 trillion / year. Adding Sanders' proposals will increase this by ~200%. I would like to see an analysis of how to make up that extra ~2 trillion / year in spending by increasing taxes and closing loopholes. Include the savings from not paying for healthcare. I would bet the median taxpayer would see their costs go up.

[nitrogen]

I would bet the median taxpayer would see their costs go up.

This is likely true, but I also expect it would be worth it in terms of social stability and progress. It's okay if your costs go up if you also get better health and education out of the deal, so earning power also goes up.

[oldmanjay]

Every voter gets to decide if they find that okay. Your opinion isn't really operative.

[nitrogen]

I was raised in a very conservative environment. I now hold progressive opinions because I find the arguments compelling. It seems insane to me to deny large segments of the population access to the things everyone else uses to succeed (education and healthcare), and then expect those outcast people not to commit crimes or drain welfare or break down civil society.

There are many who agree, so lots of voters will be voting to express that agreement. You can try to change my mind, but you must do so by solid argument, not by telling me my opinion isn't operative.

[trelltron]

For what it's worth, the entire civilised world agrees with you.

[EdHominem]

If you don't agree you're probably ignoring the cost of maintaining social order in some other way.

As for what every voter gets - a pull at a lever with minimal connection to person and no connection to policy.

[aljones]

Current deficit is actually about 500 billion per year.

[randyrand]

How could it save you money? 18 Trillion is the entire US GDP. It's literally the cost of all our products made annually in the US combined.

edit: oops. Its 18 trillion over a decade. So 10% our GDP.

[dangerlibrary]

so, 7% less of our gdp than we spend on healthcare right now.

[randyrand]

Interesting. Hmm maybe we should look into centrally planning other industries too.

[bendbro]

I agree. We centrally plan the police, water, electricity, and roads. Health care should be no different.

[randyrand]

I so no reason to stop there. What about other necessities such as the agriculture and food industry? The ISP business should be federally planned as well.

I'm even starting to think the electronics industry and software industries would benefit from being completely centrally planned.

History has shown that free markets fail to allocate well. And lots of socialist and communist countries have demonstrated that fully centrally planning an economy is possible and can be done well. Central planning rarely fails.

[dangerlibrary]

Both history and theory show that free markets do not allocate resources well when the basic assumptions underlying efficient markets don't hold.

In the presence of non-rational behavior - such the the type of decisions people tend to make when making what they believe to be life or death decisions with extremely imperfect (and asymmetric) information - markets do not efficiently allocate resources. Throw in the fact that the decisions are frequently framed in terms of probabilities and made under duress and you've got a whole mess of psychological problems as well, even if the economic assumptions did hold (they don't).

That doesn't speak to a need for centralized planning per se, but it does mean that markets won't do the job correctly on their own.

[bendbro]

The agriculture industry is already heavily subsidized to prevent food shortages.

But breaking away from the sarcasm, I agree that communism isn't useful. It's just there are already parts of the United States are mostly government controlled, so an argument that no parts should be falls flat on it's face.

[jrnichols]

WSJ and their wild speculation about Apple stuff and constantly quoting "sources briefed on the matter" turned me off to them a while back.

But vice/heavy and sometimes wired even still have content that I'd throw $4/mo at.

[mattlutze]

Hmm.

3rd paragraph they break it down some -- 15 Trillion for health care over 10 years, or averaging 1.5 Trillion per year.

There were ~151 million Americans in the labor force and employed last month[1]. If they're the folks that will be paying, then it's something like $9,934 per year in taxes that need to be collected per tax payer, to support the (in 2013) roughly 316 million population[2] of the US with an additional roughly $4,747 in government spending.

(I'm using 2016 employment numbers because 2013 we were still recovering from the recession, unemployment was much higher, and it's better to play with conservative estimates.)

WHO[3] has 2013 numbers indicating Government spend on healthcare at $4,307 per capita, and total spend (govt. + private) at $9,146.

With 2013 numbers, we'd be bumping the public spending on health care to $9,054 per capita.

To note, in 2013, of the US private spending, $3,063 out of $4,839 is on insurance plans. The remaining $1,776 is the per capita out of pocket cost (again, for 2013).

I don't think I know of any single-payer systems around the world that covers all costs. UK, Germany, Sweden [3-5] all have expansive single-payer systems established. The out of pocket is indeed lower for these -- a few hundred to $700 ish per capita vs our $1,700.

Those programs, if you have a gander, are more substantial for the massively lower government spend per capita on healthcare overall. If we're suddenly looking at $9k per capita govt spend, vs the 3-5 for these other states, I'm not sure that we've yet fixed something.

The selling point of the Bernie concept must be putting this initially more-expensive insurance plan in place ($3,xxx vs $4,747) with the goal that sometime after 10 years we'll have seen enough price suppression that our out-of-pocket goes down enough to break even, or start to reduce total costs, over the private-only market.

10 years is a really long time. And adding $9,900 / year on average to each taxpayer seems like a big number.

[1]: http://www.dlt.ri.gov/lmi/laus/us/usadj.htm

[2]: http://www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/us-population-2013/

[3]: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.country.country-USA?lang=e...

[4]: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.country.country-GBR?lang=e...

[5]: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.country.country-DEU?lang=e...

[6]: http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.country.country-SWE?lang=e...