No, Bernie Sanders is not going to bankrupt America to the tune of $18 trillion
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/09/15/no-bernie-sanders-is-not-going-to-bankrupt-america-to-the-tune-of-18-trillion/
Holy cow! He must be advocating for some crazy stuff that will bankrupt America! But is that really an accurate picture of what Sanders is proposing? And is this the kind of number we should be frightened of?
The answer isnt quite so dramatic: while Sanders does want to spend significant amounts of money,
almost all of it is on things were already paying for; he just wants to change how we pay for them. In some ways its by spreading out a cost currently borne by a limited number of people to all taxpayers. His plan for free public college would do this: right now, its paid for by students and their families, while under Sanders plan wed all pay for it in the same way we all pay for parks or the military or food safety....
....But health care is nevertheless a good place to examine why these big numbers can be so misleading. At the moment, total health care spending in the United States runs over $3 trillion a year; according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, over the next decade (from 2015-2024), America will spend a total of $42 trillion on health care. This is money that you and I and everyone else spends. We spend it in a variety of ways: through our health-insurance premiums, through the reduced salaries we get if our employers pick up part or all of the cost of those premiums, through our co-pays and deductibles, and through our taxes that fund Medicare, Medicaid, ACA subsidies, and the VA health care system. Were already paying about $10,000 a year per capita for health care....
....Theres something else to keep in mind:
every single-payer system in the world, and there are many of them of varying flavors, is cheaper than the American health care system. Every single one. So whatever you might say about Sanders advocacy for a single-payer system, you cant say it represents some kind of profligate, free-spending idea that would cost us all terrible amounts of money.