Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akiselev | Hacker News Reader

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> Medicare for all would cost 2.5 - 3 trillion a year.

In 2016, Medicare cost a total of $588 billion [1], covering over 55 million people [2]. The vast majority of those people are over the age of 65 and on average, over 50% of a person's lifetime healthcare costs will be paid after the age of 65 [3]. It would cost over $3 trillion to have Medicare for all if every person alive in the United States was over 65 years old, which is obviously wrong. The real cost would be closer to $1.5 trillion if the US just paid private insurance companies to cover everybody.

> Current tax collection collects about 1.5 trillion.

No, 2016 tax collections for just the Federal government were $3.3 trillion [1]. The combined total of federal, state, and local is estimated to be at least twice that.

> If you tax millionaires at 100% you'd see maybe another trillion.

A 15-35% tax rate on millionaires yields at least $500 billion a year in income tax revenue [4]. Increasing capital gains taxes to 100% alone would net almost $2 trillion a year.

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/115th-congress-2017-...

[2] https://blog.medicare.gov/2015/07/27/medicare-and-medicaid-5...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361028/

[4] https://www.irs.gov/uac/SOI-Tax-Stats-Individual-Income-Tax-...

>No, 2016 tax collections for just the Federal government were $3.3 trillion [1]. The combined total of federal, state, and local is estimated to be at least twice that.

I was unclear. The 2016 budget had 1.1 trillion in discretionary spending and 2.4 trillion in mandatory spending.[1]

If you stopped paying the national debt, skipped out on our UN and NATO obligations, and ended social security as well as many other social programs then you have the number you quoted. Still in 2016 we borrowed over 500 billion as we can't afford to meet our current obligations as is.

State and local governments are cash strapped for the most part. For many existing taxes don't even cover their current expenditures. You can't simply divert all of those funds to healthcare, massive cuts to services would have to be included.

>Increasing capital gains taxes to 100% alone would net almost $2 trillion a year.

An increase of even half that would turn the United States into a third world nation overnight as huge amounts of capital flees our unreasonable tax system.

As for the rest of it the economists and policy analysts at the Urban Institute disagree with your assessment:

http://www.urban.org/research/publication/sanders-single-pay...

[1]http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/119/2016

  In 2016, Medicare cost a total of $588 billion, covering over 55 million people.

That's a cost of $10,700 per person per year, just for the costs not paid by the patient. Stop and think about that a minute.

ok, but im not sure what your point is.

medical costs are very high in the US, and these are the patients who need the most care and the most treatments. I would expect the cost for medicare (a program that is legally disallowed from negotiating prices with their suppliers, and which covers only people aged 65 or over) to be quite high, and actually im surprised its that low.

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