May 13, 2016
The Washington Post really, really doesn’t like Bernie Sanders and they miss no opportunity to display this dislike. For this reason, it is not surprising that they had a field day highlighting a report from the Tax Policy Center showing that his program would increase the debt by $18 trillion over the course of a decade. As the folks at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) noted, this study was good for four different pieces over a seven hour period.
The main story in the Tax Policy Center analysis was that Sanders universal Medicare program would cost far more than he assumes. While they have some basis for their pessimism, it would have been reasonable to note that Sanders has some basis for his numbers. Specifically, other countries that have single-payer type systems have costs that are comparable to what Sanders assumes in his projections.
Of course getting from here to there is hardly an easy task and the Post and anyone else would be right to be skeptical about whether it could be done smoothly. But an honest discussion would make this point clearly. In other words, if we could make our health care system work as well as the systems in the United Kingdom, Denmark, or Canada, then Sanders would be right about the cost.
The Tax Policy Center is saying that it can’t be done. Again, they could be right, but it is not obvious that our government is that much more incompetent and/or corrupt than the governments in these other countries. In any case, the job of a newspaper should be to provide information to readers, which the Post has clearly done in its single-minded crusade to trash Bernie Sanders and his agenda.
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