Tuesday, July 30, 2019

The Fundamental Dishonesty Behind Kamala Harris’ Health Plan

When analyzing Democrats’ promises on health care ahead of the 2020 presidential campaign, a researcher with the liberal Urban Institute earlier this year proffered some sage advice: “We should always be suspect of any public policy—especially when it comes to something as complicated as health care—when anybody tells us everybody is going to get more and pay less for it. It’s really not possible.”

Someone should have given that advice to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). Her health plan, a modified version of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ single-payer health care program that she released on Monday in a Medium post and on her website, pledges that it will lead to the following outcomes:

Every American will be a part of this new Medicare system….Seniors will see stronger Medicare benefits than they have now. We will cover millions more people who don’t have health insurance today. And we will reduce costs, save our country money, and ensure that no American has to sacrifice getting the care they need just because the cost is a barrier.

As with Barack Obama’s salesmanship of Obamacare more than a decade ago, Harris’ health plan relies upon the exact strategy the Urban Institute researchers decried of promising everything to everybody. In her socialist utopia, everyone will have coverage—coverage that provides better benefits than the status quo—even as health costs decline dramatically.

Like Obama’s “like your plan” pledge, which PolitiFact dubbed the “Lie of the Year” for 2013, Harris’ plan rests on optimistic scenarios that have little possibility of coming to fruition. But one false premise underpins the entire plan:

We will set up an expanded Medicare system, with a 10-year phase-in period. During this transition, we will automatically enroll newborns and the uninsured into this new and improved Medicare system, give all doctors time to get into the system, and provide a commonsense path for employers, employees, the underinsured, and others on federally-designated programs, such as Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act exchanges, to transition. This will expand the number of insured Americans and create a new viable public system that guarantees universal coverage at a lower cost. Expanding the transition window will also lower the overall cost of the program. [Emphasis mine.]

As any math major can explain, extending the transition window for a move to a single-payer health-care system will not, as Harris tries to claim, lower the overall cost of the program once the entire program takes effect. But it will significantly lower the cost of the program during the transition.

Extending the single-payer transition period to ten years—which conveniently coincides with the ten-year budget window that the Congressional Budget Office uses to analyze major legislation—will keep most of the program’s costs “off the books” and hidden from the public until after her proposal makes it on to the statute books. It also means that her plan wouldn’t take full effect until well after Harris leaves office, meaning she can blame her successor for any problems that occur during the implementation phase.

This fiscal gimmick—delaying most of the spending associated with single payer to outside the ten-year budget window—allows Harris to draw a contrast with Sanders, in which she claims that many middle-class families would not have to pay a single cent in added taxes for all the “free” health care they would receive under a single-payer system:

One of Senator Sanders’ options is to tax households making above $29,000 an additional 4% income-based premium. I believe this hits the middle class too hard. That’s why I propose that we exempt households making below $100,000 [from new taxes to pay for single payer], along with a higher income threshold for middle-class families living in high-cost areas.

Analysts from across the political spectrum agree that the $30 trillion (or more) in new taxes needed to fund a single-payer health care system cannot come from the wealthy alone. Yet Harris proceeds to make that exact argument—that the middle class can have all the “free” health care they want, with someone else footing the bill.

Apart from the fiscal legerdemain, the proposal contains other controversial provisions. While she now claims she would allow private insurance to continue—a reversal of her earlier comments this past January—Harris’ plan states that these insurers would get “reimbursed less than what the [government-run] Medicare plan will cost to operate.” She may tolerate private insurers for the sake of political expediency, but her bias in favor of the government-run plan demonstrates that they would have little more than a token presence in any system of her design.

This post was originally published at The Federalist.