Cherry-picking Statistics to Bash Sanders’ Medicare-for-All Plan

[eridani]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steffie-woolhandler/bernie-sanders-medicare-for-all_b_9385012.html

In the heat of battling Sen. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton's camp (and the camp followers at the Washington Post and Fortune magazine) has made a remarkable discovery: National health insurance (aka Medicare-for-All) hurts poor people.

How is that possible? It's not. But a widely-quoted analysis by Ken Thorpe, a former Clinton administration official, used statistical sleight of hand to zoom in on the tiny slice of the poor who might pay more (while getting better care), and hide the vast majority who would gain.

Here are the real numbers we came up with by analyzing data from the Census Bureau's 2015 Current Population Survey, the standard source for estimates of income and health insurance coverage.

At present 9.2 million people living in poverty -- and 8.8 million just above the poverty line -- are uninsured. They often can't get vital care, and when they do, they face ruinous medical bills. For these 18 million, Medicare-for-All would be a godsend.

Another 10.7 million poor Americans and 21.5 million near-poor have private insurance. For virtually all of them, the new Medicare-for-All taxes would cost less than their current premiums.

Some of this windfall would go directly to families that now pay all or part of their own premiums.

The rest would go to employers who now chip in to premiums for the poor and near-poor workers, but most economists believe these gains would be passed on to workers since benefit costs are, in fact, deducted from wages.

Comment by Don McCanne of PNHP: An Improved Medicare for All system would provide for everyone all necessary health care, and it would be funded with progressive taxes that are fair and affordable for each of us. Using one tentative set of tax policies as an example of how the system could be funded does not change this basic truth.

Selected numbers associated with Bernie Sanders’ loosely sketched out Medicare for All proposal have been used to attack the fundamental concept of single payer with no acknowledgement that eventual legislation would ferret out any numbers or assumptions that might be slightly off (though that's in dispute) and then carefully tune them to get the financing right.

One example, using the widely circulated set of numbers, indicates that some lower income individuals might end up paying more than they do now, though the extent and intensity of the deficits have been exaggerated, as the analysis by Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein shows.

The point is that tax policies are quite malleable, with many potential sources and variable rates. They can be adjusted to ensure that taxes would be equitable for all.

Under the tentative Sanders numbers, about 1.2 million lower-income individuals might be slightly worse off financially, but at least they would be insured. Compare that to the 2.9 million adults who are in the ACA coverage gap who remain uninsured - a far worse problem than facing a modest financial imbalance. It would be far easier to adjust the taxes under a single payer system than it would be to fill in the coverage gap resulting from the complex administrative infrastructure created by ACA.

Those who continue to bash the Medicare for All concept based on tentative numbers and then conclude that we should stick with the Affordable Care Act are being disingenuous.

The Medicare for All model only needs fine tuning to meet the goal of health care for all, whereas merely patching the irreparably flawed ACA infrastructure will always leave us short of the goal. We need the right infrastructure, and then we can get them numbers right.