The cost of the vice president’s vision of government-provided health care, outlined during the 2019 primary, would be stupendous.
In the New York Times last week, political scientist Jacob Hacker called Vice President Kamala Harris’s Medicare for All proposal something she should embrace as “a central part of her 2024 campaign.” Harris has long favored the dramatic expansion of the role of the federal government in health care, supporting the Medicare for All Act as a member of the Senate and proposing her own version of single-payer health care while campaigning for the Democratic nomination in 2019.
Our new report, published by the Center for Health and Economy of the American Action Forum, estimates that the 2019 Harris plan would, if implemented by 2028, increase federal spending by $44 trillion over the next decade. The plan would also cover 11 million illegal aliens and eliminate the private coverage of around 180 million Americans.
While then-senator Harris endorsed a series of large tax increases that would add up to $1.7 trillion annually as “good options” to pay for her proposal, these would cover less than half of the new spending. Ultimately, the Harris plan would have to be financed by adding yet more debt to a total that is already alarmingly large and shows no signs of falling.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the National Review Online (paywall)
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Theo Merkel is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior research fellow at Paragon Health Institute. Stephen T. Parente is a professor of finance and an associate dean of global initiatives at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota and the former chief economist for health policy at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2019 to 2020.
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