Medicare-for-All new tax a lot less than Health Insurance premiums and other costs now!!

Medicare-for-All already clearly tells us how it will be paid for, so it's was disappointing to see the Democratic presidential contenders ganging up on Elizabeth Warren over how we're going to pay for it when it's already obvious. Some of it will be in the payroll tax, FICA.

What Warren's opponents were suggesting was free health insurance, a pathetic and misleading path to take.

Democrats were saying, especially Beto O'Rourke, that a tax would hurt the lower and middle class.

O’Rourke’s campaign took another swipe at Warren. “Beto has been very clear that he will not raise taxes on those who make less than $250,000 a year.

Uh, everyone who earns an income is already paying a tax for Medicare, and the amount being taxed is dependent on income, so the working poor will not be disproportionally hurt.

But even this doesn't preclude exempting - or even including a progressive fractional percentage - to the lower portion of someone's income.

But to suggest it should be free, with no tax increase, is playing right into the "no tax" ridiculousness of Republican politics. Democrats should be better than this.

Some kind of progressive increase to everyone's FICA tax is a whole lot better and dramatically less costly than...

1. Yearly premium increases.

2. Shopping for insurance.

3. Co-Pays and huge Deductibles.

4. Surprise medical bills.

5. Unaffordable drug prices.

6. Denial of coverage.

7. Increasing employee health care premiums.

8. Forming associations to buy group insurance.

9. Union employees renegotiating insurance coverage.

10. Health care Bankruptcy.

11. The growing number of preventable deaths.

12. Out-of-network costs.

13. Drug Testing.

14. Work Requirements.

15. Continuing to support a horribly broken system.

Plus standardizing the cost of every medical procedure nationwide will go a long way to reform the disproportionate price differences we're now seeing, resulting in medical vacations out of the U.S. and hospital consolidation.

PolitiFact also included this rating:

"For people making between $50,000 and $75,000 a year, their taxes are going up about $5,000 because the fact is, they will pay more in new taxes" for Medicare for All. — Former vice president Joe Biden

This is Mostly False. Biden used an unusual level of specificity ... families making between $50,000 and $75,000 per year ... impact of a 4% income tax, plus a 7.5% payroll tax ... This math is problematic on many levels. For one thing, Sanders’ bill doesn’t include any financing mechanism at all.

Another problem is that highlighting the potential tax burden of Medicare for All without discussing overall costs is misleading.

NEW STUDY: Medicare-for-All to cost $32 trillion Saving $900 billion Insuring everyone, 32.2 million more people:

The study from the Urban Institute and the Commonwealth Fund found $32.01 trillion in new federal revenue would be needed similar to the one put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and backed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). 

The flip side is that the study finds the plan would provide large savings to American households, who would no longer have to pay premiums or deductibles for their care, resulting in $886 billion in savings for people over 10 years. The plan would also provide insurance to everyone, reducing the number of uninsured from 32.2 million people to zero, the study found. Proponents like Warren argue that the elimination of premiums and deductibles could balance out the higher taxes.

A few other plans were also studied. Keep in mind, these halfway plans can be made worse by any party opposing universal insurance;

1. A plan that provides a government-run option plus generous government subsidies to help people buy insurance, along the lines of the Biden and Buttigieg plans, would cost $1.3 trillion over 10 years, much less than full-scale Medicare for All. The proposal would reduce the number of uninsured from 32.2 million to 6.6 million people. That proposal would not eliminate premiums and deductibles, though.

2. The study also examined a single-payer “lite” proposal, that would provide less benefits and require some out-of-pocket costs from enrollees, while also not covering people in the country illegally. That scaled-back plan would cost $15.6 trillion over 10 years, about half of the full-scale plan, while providing insurance to everyone in the country legally.
The “lite” proposal would also reduce total U.S. spending on health care by about 6 percent, thanks to lower payments to doctors and hospitals, while the full-scale single-payer proposal would increase total U.S. health care spending by about 20 percent, due in large part to more people gaining coverage and using health care.