Earlier quoted context omitted.
and our private spending on insurance would drop by a similar amount. its basically zero sum. bernie's plan in worst case scenario was a few hundred billion a year more total but the coverage was superior to almost every private plan out there.
He claims this, but it's far from certain. The argument that public healthcare will be "basically zero sum" with superior coverage is one built on flawed assumptions, with cherry-picked data, and ultimately overestimates the potential savings. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/feb/26/bernie-san...
that part is absolutely a zero sum game.
now once you start adding in the rest of the plan the costs go up but that is a result of actual improvements in benefits (a good thing).
when I said worst case I was picking from studies unrelated to bernie's platform that showed an increase vs current system projects spending but it was modest. 700 billion/year in additional costs beyond what bernie has accounted for. and that is using the most expensive analysis I could find.
its probably not going to work quite that cleanly in reality. but the numbers are close enough that its worth it for our country to move to single payer with the additional benefits.
here is one of the sources I used to pull total costs from. most of the stuff I found personally ended up below their estimates. politifact's range is actually far less than the one I used by almost 20 trillion.
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/dont-confuse-changes-federa...
--- this is a document i wrote up for my friends/family on the topic has all my sources and various other commentary.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-4-fYlRSRvtCar98APl6PzLL...