Article from Reason by Eric Boehm.

A plan to bring single-payer health care to the United States by expanding Medicare to cover nearly all Americans would cost more than $32 trillion over the first 10 years—and paying for it would require a doubling of current tax revenues, plus some.

That’s the bottom line in a new study released Monday by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a free market think tank. The analysis attempts to apply a price tag to the single-payer proposal backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), otherwise known as the “Medicare-for-all” plan. Sanders’ plan would see the federal government replace private health insurance that Americans currently receive as a benefit of employment or purchase independently, and would have the federal government become responsible for current state-level health care spending.

Even with conservative cost estimates—conservative because the estimate assumes, as Sanders does, that the single-payer plan would deliver savings in administrative costs and drug prices—the Medicare-for-all plan would require an “unprecedented” increase in government spending, writes Charles Blahous, the study’s author.

“Doubling all federal individual and corporate income taxes going forward would be insufficient to fully finance the plan, even under the assumption that provider payment rates are reduced by over 40 percent,” says Blahous, who was a health policy advisor to President George W. Bush and served as a Medicare trustee during the Obama administration. “Such an increase in the scope of federal government operations would precipitate a correspondingly large increase in federal taxation or debt and would be unprecedented if undertaken as an enduring federal commitment.”

Read the entire article at Reason.

Image Credit: By AFGE (AFGE Participates in #StopFastTrack Rallies) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons