Who could forget the Socialist-splash that the Wall Street Journal made a few weeks ago, with their Bernie Sanders "critique"?
Afterall, $15 Trillion (spread out over 10 years) sounds like a LOT of money.
What the Journal failed to report however is that -- We are going to spend that much on health care anyway, even if Single-Payer is once again is blocked. Probably even more so, with Insurance Corporations still getting their lion's-share of those Trillions in Health Care dollars.
The Wall Street Journal gets whacked: How its Bernie Sanders hit piece completely backfired
A provocative headline claims his proposals will cost taxpayers $18 trillion. Nonsense, says a UMASS professor
by Thom Hartmann, AlterNet, salon.com -- Sept 24, 2015
[...]
You see, the Wall Street Journal piece cited researchby Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And there was just one small problem with their interpretation of his research. They blatantly omitted his conclusion.
[...]He [Friedman] writes that the Journal wasn’t completely wrong: the [single-payer] program would involve spending $15 trillion over a decade. But they left out the key detail:it would actually save the country a total $5 trillion over those 10 years. We’d see those savings in reduced administrative waste, lower pharmaceutical and device prices, and by decreasing the rate of medical inflation.
Because the simple fact is: We, as a people, are going to spend that $15 trillion on health care anyway. The difference is that under the current model, we pay that money to private insurance companies. And those private companies have much higher levels of administrative costs, fraud and general waste than Medicare does. Another difference is that the government would be negotiating drug prices, making drugs more affordable for everyone.
[...]
Economics Professor Gerald Friedman was not content to just let sleeping Insurance-lobbyist dogs lie ...
Instead he took to the Internet to correct the record ... and in the process, slam the Wall Street Journal for misquoting his research.