Senator Bernie Sanders says most people in America will have to pay more in taxes to pay for his Medicare-for-All plan. But he insists that’s a good deal -- and will save people money overall by lowering health costs.
For many Americans, though, that would not be true. Households that spend a lot on health care already would be most likely to see the benefit. But for many, higher taxes would exceed any savings.
Sanders, a top contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, says the savings would come from eliminating insurance premiums, co-pays and out-of-pocket expenses, he said in an interview with National Public Radio on Monday.
Under his Medicare For All plan, Sanders says Americans could erase $20,000 of annual private health care expenses for $10,000 in additional taxes.
“Is that a good deal? I think that’s a pretty good deal,” Sanders said.
Yet the 181 million taxpayers with employer-sponsored coverage could miss out on the benefits of the Sanders plan, and even those receiving Medicaid could pay more, according to health-care policy experts on both sides of the political spectrum.
Medicare For All is a central piece of Sanders’s argument to expand access to health care and he made his pitch during the first Democratic presidential debates last week in Miami.
That $10,000 per capita number in new taxes is an estimate of the more than $30 trillion cost for Medicare-for-All over a decade spread across the 330 million people living in the U.S. And it’s unlikely that $10,000 cost would be spread evenly, said Cynthia Cox, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Corporations and the wealthy would pay more than lower-income people, she said.
A family of four with two incomes that total $100,000 who buys insurance on their own and has at least one member in poor health spends about $30,400 on health costs annually, according to estimates from the Kaiser Family Foundation. An identical family that has employer-sponsored health care spends $15,000 annually.
Under Sanders’s plan, the family who buys insurance on their own could pay $20,000 in additional taxes but come out ahead. If they had insurance provided through their jobs, that’s a $5,000 net loss.