The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and the Urban Institute Health Policy Center have released a joint analysis of Senator Bernie Sanders' tax and spending proposals that say his plans for improvements to health care, education, and other programs would add $18 trillion to the federal deficit.
According to the Associated Press, the analysis said Sanders' plan to raise taxes by more than $15 trillion over 10 years wouldn't be enough to pay for a government-run health care system, free undergraduate college tuition, improvements to Social Security, and other new programs. The study put the cost of the health care plan alone at more than $30 trillion.
The study's analysis concludes that those among the top 5 percent, with incomes averaging $650,000 a year, would come out losers under the Sanders plan, paying about $110,000 more in taxes than they would receive in benefits. However, those in the middle-income range — averaging $41,000 annually — would come out about $8,700 ahead, receiving benefits worth that much more than the taxes they would pay.
Recommended For You
The report isn't going unchallenged, however. In addition to criticism from the Sanders campaign, which says that it "wildly overestimates" the cost of the health care program and also "significantly underestimates" how much money the program will save compared with the status quo, a blog piece from two prominent medical professionals, published on the Huffington Post website, has questioned some of the assumptions of the study's authors.
David Himmelstein, professor of public health at CUNY and lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Steffie Woolhandler, professor in the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College and lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School, both cofounders of Physicians for a National Health Program, said that the study's estimates regarding the health care plan are "ridiculous."
Those estimates, they wrote, "project outlandish increases in the utilization of medical care, ignore vast savings under single-payer reform, and ignore the extensive and well-documented experience with single-payer systems in other nations — which all spend far less per person on health care than we do."
Specifically, they challenged the figures used by the study for administrative savings, drug costs, utilization of care, and disruption of the existing system, and cited figures they said indicated that the savings from the Sanders plan would be far greater than the study posited — resulting in savings many trillions of dollars higher than the study concluded.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
