Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has made some extraordinary promises in his campaign for president, including free health care, a federal jobs guarantee, universal forgiveness of all student debt, and radical expansions of nearly every government program from Social Security to housing subsidies. When asked at a CNN town hall last night how he would pay for this gargantuan expansion of government, Sen. Sanders presented moderator Chris Cuomo with a new document that Sanders claimed detailed how he would pay for his proposals. But don’t be fooled: these numbers still don’t add up, and Sanders should be pressed to explain his magic math at tonight’s debate.
The first problem is that the list of Sanders’ proposed spending increases is incomplete. Sanders has proposed costly plans for K-12 education, expanding disability insurance, paid family leave, and more that were not accounted for in the new document. He also grossly understates the cost of his Medicare for All plan by citing a flawed analysis that neglected to incorporate the costs of specific benefits Sanders proposes, such as universal coverage for long-term services and supports, and failed to account for how offering universal health-care benefits more generous than those offered by any other country on earth would increase utilization of health services.
Sanders and his surrogates regularly claim that critics are wrong to focus on how much Medicare for All increases government costs because it would reduce the total cost of health care. But independent analyses from the Urban Institute and Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have concluded that even with the aggressive price controls he has proposed, Sanders’ Medicare-for-All framework would actually increase national health expenditures by up to $7 trillion. Sanders himself also admitted in a 60 minutes interview this weekend that his Medicare-for-All plan would likely cost around $30 trillion, yet the list of “options” Sanders has offered to pay for them (options which, it should be noted, he has never explicitly endorsed enacting together) would together cover less than 60 percent of that amount by the Sanders campaign’s own accounting.