During Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton criticized Bernie Sanders’ proposal for a “Medicare for All” healthcare program, stating, “the numbers just don’t add up.”
“A respected health economist said that these plans would cost a trillion dollars more a year,” Clinton said, likely referring to a recent analysis by Emory University professor Kenneth Thorpe, who helped craft a single-payer healthcare system in Sanders’ home state of Vermont, which said Sanders’ proposal was off by an extra $1.1 trillion annually.
“So if you’re having Medicare for all, single-payer, you need to level with people about what they will have at the end of the process you are proposing,” Clinton said. “And based on every analysis that I can find by people who are sympathetic to the goal, the numbers don’t add up, and many people will actually be worse off than they are right now.”