Subject: **ICYMI: NYT | Left-Leaning Economists Question Cost of Bernie**
From: Adrienne Elrod <[email-masked]>
To: Adrienne Elrod <[email-masked]>
Cc: Alexandria Phillips <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2016 19:59:41 -0500
List-Id: <toptalkers.hillaryclinton.com>

Left-Leaning Economists Question Cost of Bernie Sanders’s Plans

*By JACKIE CALMES
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/jackie_calmes/index.html>**
–
New York Times*

FEB. 15, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/16/us/politics/left-leaning-economists-question-cost-of-bernie-sanderss-plans.html?smid=tw-nytpolitics&smtyp=cur&_r=0

WASHINGTON — With his expansive plans to increase the size and role of
government, Senator Bernie Sanders
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/bernie-sanders-on-the-issues.html?inline=nyt-per>
has
provoked a debate not only with his Democratic rival for president, Hillary
Clinton
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/hillary-clinton-on-the-issues.html?inline=nyt-per>,
but also with liberal-leaning economists who share his goals but question
his numbers and political realism.

The reviews of some of these economists, especially on Mr. Sanders’s health
care plans, suggest that Mrs. Clinton could have been too conservative in
their debate last week when she said that his agenda
<https://berniesanders.com/issues/how-bernie-pays-for-his-proposals/> in
total would increase the size of the federal government by 40 percent
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/us/politics/what-youve-missed.html?_r=0>.
That level would surpass any government expansion since the buildup in
World War II.

The increase could exceed 50 percent, some experts suggest, based on an
analysis
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/296831690/Kenneth-Thorpe-s-analysis-of-Bernie-Sanders-s-single-payer-proposal#scribd>
by
a respected health economist that Mr. Sanders’s single-payer health plan
could cost twice what the senator, who represents Vermont, asserts, and on
critics’ belief that his economic assumptions are overly optimistic.

His campaign strongly contests both critiques, defending its numbers and
attacking prominent critics as Clinton sympathizers and industry
consultants.

Mr. Sanders, on “Fox News Sunday,” reiterated his oft-stated claim that
progressive critics dispute: “A family right in the middle of the economy
would pay $500 more in taxes and get a reduction in their health costs of
$5,000.”

But by the reckoning of the left-of-center economists, none of whom are
working for Mrs. Clinton, the new spending would add $2 trillion to $3
trillion a year on average to federal spending; by comparison, total
federal spending is projected to be above $4 trillion in the next
president’s first year.

“The numbers don’t remotely add up,” said Austan Goolsbee, formerly
chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, now at the
University of Chicago.

Alluding to one progressive analyst’s early criticism of the Sanders agenda
as “puppies and rainbows
<http://www.vox.com/2016/1/17/10784528/bernie-sanders-single-payer-health-care>,”
Mr. Goolsbee said that after his and others’ further study,

“They’ve evolved into magic flying puppies with winning Lotto tickets tied
to their collars.”

Unlike Republican presidential candidates who have proposed trillions of
dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses without offsetting
savings — Donald J. Trump’s plans
<http://crfb.org/blogs/do-donald-trumps-campaign-proposals-add> could add
$15 trillion to the debt over 10 years, the centrist Committee for a
Responsible Federal Budget estimates — Mr. Sanders has proposed higher
taxes on the wealthy and businesses to pay for his plans, besides the
health care savings he counts on.

Mrs. Clinton has also proposed tax increases on the rich and corporations
to pay for her agenda, which she estimates would cost an additional $100
billion a year, or $1.2 trillion over 10 years. That tally does not include
middle-class tax cuts she is planning but has yet to unveil.

Mr. Sanders’s plan also includes a new, across-the-board 2.2 percent income
tax to help pay for his single-payer, government-run health plan for all.
But progressive economists as well as business groups say middle-class
taxpayers would inevitably pay more for the European-style social welfare
state that Mr. Sanders envisions.

They dispute his contention that all but the richest Americans would be
better off, on balance, with higher wages and benefits like expanded Social
Security
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/social_security_us/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
free public colleges and, most of all, free health care.

His policy director, Warren Gunnels, dismissed the critics in an interview,
saying, “They’ve picked sides with Hillary Clinton.” The campaign has a
list of 130 endorsees, including some economists.

“If, at the end of the day, people don’t believe that we can achieve the
same savings as Canada, Britain, France, Japan, South Korea, Australia are
achieving on health care, then we have a fundamental disagreement,” Mr.
Gunnels said, naming countries
<http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2015/oct/us-health-care-from-a-global-perspective>
with
single-payer systems.

It is not just Mr. Sanders’s assumptions for health care savings that
critics contest. Jared Bernstein, the former economic adviser to Vice
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. who is now at the liberal Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities, examined a 53-page paper by the economist advising
Mr. Sanders, Gerald Friedman of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,
that is widely circulating on the left.

While calling Mr. Friedman’s work a good effort, Mr. Bernstein cited
several assumptions as “wishful thinking.” Among them were minimal
health-cost inflation, economic growth reaching 5.3 percent and, in the
face of that heated-up economy, no action from the Federal Reserve to apply
brakes.

“We need a deep investment in infrastructure, more-efficient health care
and less student debt,” Mr. Bernstein said. “But when you put it all
together, government’s role in the economy goes well beyond anything we’ve
ever considered.” He also said that protecting the Affordable Care Act
against Republican opposition should be a higher priority — a critique
echoed by Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Sanders has described his health care plan as “Medicare for All
<https://berniesanders.com/medicareforall/>,” but it would be far more
generous, giving all Americans broader coverage without premiums,
deductibles or co-payments. It would replace not only Medicare
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicare/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
but
also Medicaid
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicaid/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
and
the Children’s Health Insurance Program. A table in his economic adviser’s
analysis shows that all public spending currently going to military,
veterans’, American Indian and other health programs would become part of
the financing for his single-payer plan, yet Mr. Gunnels insisted that
veterans’ and American Indian health programs would remain intact. He did
not address military health benefits in an email exchange.

The critics — many of whom support the concept of single-payer plans,
including Paul Krugman
<http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/18/health-reform-is-hard/>, the Nobel
Prize
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/nobel_prizes/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>-winning
economist and Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times — note the difficulty
that Mr. Obama has had in winning and putting into effect his
less-ambitious law, which keeps the private insurance and health care
sectors in place. They worry that Mr. Sanders, as president, would exhaust
his political capital on what they call a fool’s errand, at the expense of
other initiatives on education, infrastructure, climate change, worker
benefits — and the Affordable Care Act itself.

“The single-payer idea has enormous appeal: coverage for everyone, some
effort to use the government’s bargaining power to hold down overall costs,
clean out the godawful administrative mess that the U.S. health care system
is and save money there,” said Henry J. Aaron
<http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2016/01/26-pipe-dream-single-payer-health-reform-aaron>,
a longtime health economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

But he called it a “fairy tale” in this polarized political climate. Along
with other economists in a “lefty chat group” he joins online, Mr. Aaron
said he believes that if Mr. Sanders were elected and fought for a
single-payer plan, it “would rapidly destroy his administration by using up
every ounce of political capital he’s got.”

On his campaign website, Mr. Sanders proposes more than $18 trillion in new
spending over 10 years; he does not account for some ideas he favors, like
universal prekindergarten and child care, that could put the total above
$20 trillion. About $14 trillion of the total is for health care; the rest
is chiefly for infrastructure, free college, Social Security, paid family
leave and clean-energy initiatives.

Adding $20 trillion to projected federal spending would mean about a 37
percent increase in spending through fiscal year 2026 — close to the 40
percent that Mrs. Clinton suggested. But Kenneth E. Thorpe, a prominent
health policy economist at Emory University who advised the Clintons in the
1990s, recently concluded that Mr. Sanders’s health plan would actually
cost $27 trillion, not $14 trillion, which would put total spending for all
of Mr. Sanders’s initiatives above $30 trillion through 2026.

Mr. Thorpe and Sanders aides and allies have been battling over their
differences online
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-himmelstein/kenneth-thorpe-bernie-sanders-single-payer_b_9113192.html>
.
Their trillion-dollar disputes mainly involve the amount of savings that
would be achieved by reducing red tape and bargaining for lower-cost
brand-name drugs, and whether states would continue to pay what they
currently do toward health programs that would cease under a single-payer
system.

Mr. Thorpe in recent years helped Gov. Peter E. Shumlin in Mr. Sanders’s
home state of Vermont to design a single-payer plan there. It was
unsuccessful.

“The problem was that the price tag and the amount of disruption and
redistribution was just so enormous,” Mr. Thorpe said of Mr. Shumlin’s
efforts, “that he just had to drop it.”

-- 

Adrienne K. Elrod
Director of Strategic Communications & Surrogates
Hillary For America
*www.hillaryclinton.com <http://www.hillaryclinton.com>*
@adrienneelrod

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