Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) attacked Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at Thursday night’s Democratic debate over his policy of “Medicare for All,” noting that Sanders’s own home state of Vermont rejected it because of high taxes.
Bennet is correct: Vermont tried to become the first state in the union to create a universal health insurance system — the equivalent of Sanders’s “Medicare for All” — but abandoned the effort because it was simply too costly to run.
The Washington Post noted in April that Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, called the failure the worst disappointment of his career. Nevertheless, it could not be done:
The choices Shumlin favored would essentially have doubled Vermont’s budget, raising state income taxes by up to 9.5 percent and placing an 11.5 percent payroll tax on all employers — a burden Shumlin said would pose “a risk of economic shock” — even though Vermonters would no longer pay for private health plans.
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Far and away the biggest hurdles, though, were untamed health-care costs, which were growing faster than the U.S. economy and making care increasingly unaffordable no matter how it was paid for.
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Those building a national single-payer model would confront many of those same dilemmas. But as the 2020 campaigns get underway, few Democrats show signs of acknowledging, let alone wrestling with, the gritty complexities. Even Sanders, eager as he was for Vermont to become the first single-payer state, seldom mentions that it did not come to pass.
Bennet said that he preferred a “public option” — one in which Americans could choose to be covered by Medicare. (A similar proposal failed during the 2009-10 debate over the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare).
The context of the whole discussion was a moderator’s question to Sanders about whether his many socialist proposals would require raising taxes on the middle class as well as the rich. Sanders — eventually — admitted that the middle class would pay more in taxes, but argued that they would make up the difference by paying lower premiums.
Vermont tried that, and it did not work. Bennet was correct.
Asked later by moderator Lester Holt how Sanders would make “Medicare for All” work, Sanders tried to explain that it would happen when millions of Americans rose up against the corporate interests running the health care system.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.