Single Payer: The Fantasy Continues

Ronald Brownstein agrees with me both that single payer is coming back as a cause for Democrats and that it is politically perilous for them. I'd put more emphasis on the likely unpopularity, in practice, of telling literally hundreds of millions of people that the health insurance plans they have and mostly like are now illegal. Brownstein emphasizes the cost, which is enormous:

Single-payer proposals very quickly run into sticker shock. Before the 2020 race, the Urban Institute forecast that Sanders’ plan would cost $34 trillion in federal spending over 10 years, an amount that at the time exceeded the projected 10-year spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid combined. Today the figure would be even more daunting. Holahan told me that as a first cut, he projects a single-payer plan could cost nearly twice as much over the first decade as the Urban Institute estimated before 2020, including the impact of inflation. . . .
For comparison, Holahan’s projected 10-year cost for single payer roughly equals the total amount of revenue the Congressional Budget Office forecasts the federal government currently will raise from the income and payroll tax combined over that same period.