Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, on How to Pay for Medicare for All

[Dacien]

@TimeWinder

Which is why all these threads are stupid from the start. Nearly every other country manages to pay for it; but for the US to do it would take astronomically more money than has ever existed (or something).

Jake Tapper recently had Ocasio on and asked her three times how she would pay for the grand total $40 trillion in spending she’s proposing, and each time she launched into messages about who we are, our future, how cost-effective it would be, how other countries are doing it… everything except explaining how she was going to pay for it.

Finally, at the end, Tapper concludes, “I guess I’m not going to get an answer on how you’re going to pay for it.”

[Dacien]

Here we go.

Tapper presses Ocasio-Cortez on spending plan | CNN Politics

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

I watched the interview, thanks for sharing that.

You’re right, she doesn’t say how she’ll come up with $40T. (And I personally already really want to know how we are going to come up with $21T and counting to pay off the national debt) OTOH, she discusses total costs of the health care system, and suggests the medicare for all version would cost far less overall than the current, private for-profit system costs. So, and I don’t think this will make righties feel much better, she is basically suggesting the government destroy America’s for-profit health care system and appropriate and manage the whole thing.

I’m not sure she accepts the $40T figure, I’m not sure I do either. Medicare is something like a $600B program. Expanding it to cover everybody shouldn’t balloon it to $3.6T. I mean, really? :dubious:

[Knowed_Out]

@octopus

How hard is it really to add a few zeros to the next batch of bills to be printed? If socialism does take hold in the US how bad can zoo donkey stew be?

Our president thought we could just print more bills to make up the deficit. You like your zoo donkey stew with salt?

[jz78817]

@Dacien

Oh and by the way, Charles C.W. Cooke detailed some factors that were baked in to the cost estimate in order to reach the $32 trillion price tag over ten years:

[ul]
[li]Force every doctor and hospital in America to accept Medicare reimbursement rates for all patients — these are 40 percent lower than the rates paid by private insurance — while assuming that this would have absolutely no effect on their capacity or willingness to provide services[/li][li]Raise taxes by 10 percent of GDP[/li][li]Explain to the 150 million people with private insurance that the rules have been changed so dramatically that (a) they can no longer keep their plans, and (b) henceforth, tens of millions among them will be paying more in taxes than they were previously paying in both premiums and out-of-pocket costs[/li][/ul]

In short, things that will never happen for $32 trillion, Alex.

I’m calling sock puppet. Convenient how you just showed up here last week and are relentlessly carrying Shodan’s water.

[jz78817]

@Dacien

Jake Tapper recently had Ocasio on and asked her three times how she would pay for the grand total $40 trillion in spending she’s proposing, and each time she launched into messages about who we are, our future, how cost-effective it would be, how other countries are doing it… everything except explaining how she was going to pay for it.

Finally, at the end, Tapper concludes, “I guess I’m not going to get an answer on how you’re going to pay for it.”

Just like getting Trump to explain how he was going to get Mexico to pay for his useless wall.

Right?

Right?

[Grim_Render]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

I’m not sure she accepts the $40T figure, I’m not sure I do either. Medicare is something like a $600B program. Expanding it to cover everybody shouldn’t balloon it to $3.6T. I mean, really? :dubious:

Yes, like I posted earlier, if you project it based on current medicare expenditure, you get 1.6 T. Which happens to be fairly average for one of the richest developed nations.

I am also really sceptical of the 32 T over 10 years number.

The current total expenses are 3.2 T per year. So it sounds like they just assumed that government would pay all the bills of all the actors currently in the system and multiplied that by ten years. And then took an early lunch.

[septimus]

@Airbeck

The 32 trillion estimate for medicare for all is over 10 years, that’s the first reason for your confusion, and overall spending on healthcare would be about the same. …

Facts, logic and simple arithmetic are all just left-wing distractions; American “conservatives” seek A Higher Truth.

A few days ago, one right-wing dolt here made an off-by-a-factor-of-1000 error when attempting long division, deducing that the cost of the trillion-dollar F-35 worked out to $3 per American or some such gibberish. Best is just to completely ignore any right-wing post with any numbers in it at all: The conclusions will be wrong even if the numbers aren’t themselves lies. (Amusingly though, it was HurricaneDitka — nominee for stupidest Doper of all — who first corrected his fellow traveler’s off-by-a-factor-of-1000 error.)

Are there any conservatives in the thread? Do you understand that when a price is quoted for single-payer health, employers and citizens will no longer need to pay premiums, and, depending on details, there may no longer be co-pays, or money wasted on deny-coverage red-tape? Most right-wingers are unwilling to even acknowledge that! I’ve never been sure whether they’re really too stupid to understand this, or hope that the Undecideds they’re trying to gull are so stupid. Sincere question: Will any of that ilk respond?

Very clever of the hypocrites to insist on 10-year numbers to inflate the numbers on spending they don’t like. In the past they’ve sometimes been too enthusiastic and gone with 100-year numbers — “Quadrillion dollar cost over the next century; perhaps quintillions if the Hillaryist Inflationary Terrorists have their way” — but even right-wing morons may see through that.

[jz78817]

@septimus

Are there any conservatives in the thread? Do you understand that when a price is quoted for single-payer health, employers and citizens will no longer need to pay premiums, and, depending on details, there may no longer be co-pays, or money wasted on deny-coverage red-tape? Most right-wingers are unwilling to even acknowledge that! I’ve never been sure whether they’re really too stupid to understand this, or hope that the Undecideds they’re trying to gull are so stupid. Sincere question: Will any of that ilk respond?

there’s a special class of shithead who believes both that anything run by the government is inherently evil, and that poor people must have done something to deserve to be poor so if they don’t have a job which includes health insurance they should be happy to get sick and die.

It’s really laid bare by the utter MORONS who believe that “prosperity gospel” horseshit just because some slick, well dressed sociopath gets up on stage and preaches it.

these people are so stupid they buy into the notion that if God loves you He will make you rich. therefore they despise poor people (because God obviously hates them) and give all of their money to the charlatans. Curiously, when they don’t get rich they never think “hey, maybe God doesn’t love me.”

[Heffalump_and_Roo]

The Nation article that started the controversy:

. . . it is impossible to trace the actual sources and destinations of the $21 trillion. . . The upshot is that no one can know for sure how much of that $21 trillion was, or was not, being spent legitimately.

The Vox article linked in the OP:

The Pentagon’s accounting errors are genuinely enormous, but they’re also just accounting errors — they don’t represent actual money that can be spent on something else.

He can’t know this.

To be fair, he could be right:

does not contend that all of this $21 trillion was secret or misused funding. And indeed, the plugs are found on both the positive and the negative sides of the ledger, thus potentially netting each other out.

but there’s no way to know.

The Nation article summarizes:

The status quo has been generating ever-higher DoD budgets for decades, not to mention bigger profits for Boeing, Lockheed, and other military contractors.

The losers in this situation are everyone else. The Pentagon’s accounting fraud diverts many billions of dollars that could be devoted to other national needs: health care, education, job creation, climate action, infrastructure modernization, and more. Indeed, the Pentagon’s accounting fraud amounts to theft on a grand scale—theft not only from America’s taxpayers, but also from the nation’s well-being and its future.

The author of The Nation article seems to believe that there’s actual money that could be used for other things. The author of the Vox article doesn’t provide any proof that it’s not true or even attempt to show why he says there’s no actual money behind these transactions. For all he knows, that $21T could be even higher.

How could it be higher when Congress hasn’t even appropriated that much over the years? Because the amounts flowing into the accounts don’t match the amounts appropriated by Congress, and there are thousands of missing records. Were these just made up numbers? No one seems to know.

Time and again, they found that the amounts of money reported as having flowed into and out of the Defense Department were gargantuan, often dwarfing the amounts Congress had appropriated: $1.7 trillion in 1998, $2.3 trillion in 1999, $1.1 trillion in 2000, $1.1 trillion in 2007, $875 billion in 2010, and $1.7 trillion in 2012, plus amounts in the hundreds of billions in other years.

[Gary_Kumquat]

Out of interest, can anyone advise where the estimate of $3.2tn for universal healthcare per annum comes from?

I mean, the UK spent approx $180 billion for a population of 67 million in 2017. So let’s say you want to spend twice as per much person, and let’s say you can’t get any economy of scale whatsoever…you’re still looking at $1.75 trillion, a little north of half the amount being thrown around.

[Cheesesteak]

Fuck my ass. We ALREADY spend enough public money to cover every person in the country with EuroCare*.

If we actually fixed our idiotic system, stopped it from being criminally inefficient, and quit letting Americans be the bottomless pocketbook of the medical industry, we wouldn’t have to be shaking down the Pentagon for anything.

*EuroCare is my made up name for “Pick whatever country in Europe you think isn’t a giant shithole, and assume we have the health care system they have”.

[Ludovic]

@Dacien

Jake Tapper recently had Ocasio on and asked her three times how she would pay for the grand total $40 trillion in spending she’s proposing, and each time she launched into messages about who we are, our future, how cost-effective it would be, how other countries are doing it… everything except explaining how she was going to pay for it.

Finally, at the end, Tapper concludes, “I guess I’m not going to get an answer on how you’re going to pay for it.”

Oh boo hoo, cry me a fucking flood. It’s a disaster when someone you don’t agree with does it! That sounds like every politician that ever existed.

Maybe she should ban Tapper from her press conferences for asking hard questions! Did she shake his hand? Maybe she could 'shop it to make it look like he hit her!

[Gary_Kumquat]

@Dacien

the grand total $40 trillion in spending she’s proposing

Is there a link somewhere that outlines how the $40 trillion figure was calculated?

[Shodan]

@Gary_Kumquat

Is there a link somewhere that outlines how the $40 trillion figure was calculated?

Don’t ask AOC - she doesn’t apparently know how to count.

Regards,
Shodan

[Shodan]

@Gary_Kumquat

Out of interest, can anyone advise where the estimate of $3.2tn for universal healthcare per annum comes from?

It’s based on estimates from the Urban Institute and the Mercatus Center. The estimate is probably optimistically low, since it is based on the assumption that we double all personal and corporate federal income taxes*, AND dramatically reduce payments to health care providers, drug costs, and administrative costs. (Cite.)

Regards,
Shodan

*It would have to be more than double, if we don’t want to add to the deficit.

[Gary_Kumquat]

@Shodan

Don’t ask AOC - she doesn’t apparently know how to count.

Rest assured, if I’m ever curious as to whether AOC wrongly construed spending in the 2018 election cycle, and was incorrect to directly compare conclude Handel spending $7.99m compared to McBath’s 1.23, I now know where to look.

It is unfortunate that it’s not actually relevant to the question I raised, but thanks anyhow.

[Slash1972]

AOC also puts her TP on the roll incorrectly. She’s clearly unfit for office.

[Cheesesteak]

@Shodan

if we don’t want to add to the deficit.

We wouldn’t want to do THAT, now would we?

[Gary_Kumquat]

@Shodan

It’s based on estimates from the Urban Institute and the Mercatus Center. The estimate is probably optimistically low, since it is based on the assumption that we double all personal and corporate federal income taxes*, AND dramatically reduce payments to health care providers, drug costs, and administrative costs. (Cite.)

With respect, that report does not explain at all why you would have to spend more than the $10,000 per annum you’re already currently spending. I’ve already pointed out that the UK is 43% of that, but even if you were to look at Switzerland -which by any standard has far better healthcare than the US - you should be looking at a 30% saving over your current spend.

This is the part I struggle with. Your current system costs you far more than anywhere else, yet delivers lower results…but the argument against change is that somehow if the US were to do the same thing as many other countries do, you’d fuck it up so badly it’d cost you even more?