Question for you. If Medicare for all will cots $32 trillion, and the current system would cost $56 trillion, how could we afford to pay $20 trillion less?
When people's expenses go down that $20 trillion, when people no longer have to pay on student debt and tuition, when a larger share of wealth goes to the people, that is 'real money for the citizenry'. And I haven't even gotten to benefits such as protecting the environment and having a real consumer finance protection bureau and countless more improvements.
I'll assume that Bernie would put the healthcare savings of $24T / 10 years in the hands of the working folk for them to spend as they please and 'reduce the gap'. This results in a healthcare savings of about $28,000 per year per family of 4.
This family of 4, under Bernie's plan, has zero out of pocket healthcare expenses. The working folk get additionally taxed starting at $29,000 (or perhaps closer to $32,000 when Bernie raises the minimum wage). I'll assume that this tax rate for the working folk won't be much, since Bernie is hitting the 650 US billionaires really hard so the bottom 330 million can benefit.
So we have a lot of out of pocket savings for the typical family. What they used to spend on healthcare will now be entirely handled by the government. The government needs to come up with $32T over 10 years, a 43% decrease over the old private system. Through the magic of Bernie, people used to use private insurance to pay $500 for a hospital bandaid, now the government will pay about $285 for it. Bernie generates 13.6% of this amount taking from the few hundred billionaires, and perhaps a token amount taken from the minimum (now called "living") wage people making $15 an hour.
I'm glad that families are no longer paying $28k per year due to Bernie's cost savings. I'm also glad that the healthcare costs that remain are going to be paid by "the rich", but Bernie is only extracting 13.6% of healthcare costs from them. Where does he get the other 85%? Government needs to fund that other 85%. Free health care means government funds it.
Does he take away from the military budget? Assuming we eliminate the military (perhaps Denmark and Sweden could defend us), this would save 934 billion a year, let's round up to one trillion.
Over a decade, Bernie's billionaire tax funds $4.35T of the $32T. Eliminating the military entirely will garner another $10T, which funds Bernie's plan about 45%.
We could certainly leave Bernie's plan half funded and move on to other things like "free" college.
