Dollars & Sense will be at this year's Left Forum conference in New York City, this afternoon through Sunday afternoon. Come visit D&S co-editor at the book exhibit table! We are also sponsoring two panels:
Bernie v. The Greens: What Can the Government Actually Do to Fix Our Economic Mess?, with Gerald Friedman, Jill Stein, and Sean Sweeny, moderated by Abby Scher. Sun noon to 2pm, Room L2.85.
Finance Capital and Fraud: Evidence and Discussion of Rigging & Predatory Behavior, with Jason Hecht, John Summa, and Haim Bodek, moderated by John Sarich. Sun noon to 2pm, Room 1.105.
Besides appearing on one of our panels at Left Forum, Jerry Friedman has worked up a response to the Urban Institute's study on the costs of Sanders' single-payer plan, The Sanders Single-Payer Health Care Plan: The Effect on National Health Expenditures and Federal and Private Spending, which led to all kinds of breathless reporting at the usual anti-Sanders outlets like Vox (Bernie's plan costs twice as much as he says it would!) and WashPo ("Sorry, Bernie fans!" His plan will cost $18 trillion!), claiming that it had been shown that (FAIR/Extra!'s great analyst Adam Johnson pointed out that WashPo managed to wring out four anti-Sanders stories from this one study in the space of seven hours.) The spectacle of Democratic Party think-tanks like the Urban Institute and the Tax Policy Center taking on the role of dampening people's social democratic expectations is something to behold.
Anyhow, here is the beginning of Jerry's take-down of the Urban Institute study:
The Urban Institute’s evaluation of the Sanders single-payer plan is based on dubious assumptions, questionable estimates, and some opaque arithmetic. By assuming unprecedented increases in utilization and discounting the program’s likely savings, the Urban Institute’s study produces extreme estimates about the cost of the Sanders program. The study then magnifies the impact of these costs on the Federal budget by also assuming the complete disappearance of state and local health spending, not only on Medicaid but on all other public health programs funded on the state and local level. Next, the study appears to ignore over a trillion dollars in savings that it does concede to the Sanders program, dropping these from its bottom line.
Read the rest of Jerry's rebuttal here.
Hope to see some D&S blog readers and magazine subscribers at Left Forum this weekend!