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Why Bernie Sanders’ single-payer push is great policy and even better politics:

The United States, by contrast, is very rich, and already dedicates way more than enough resources to set up the world’s most generous health-care system, and a lot more besides. We spend $3.2 trillion per year — literally twice as much as the OECD average as a share of the economy. We pay enough in health-care taxes alone — that is, the government revenue that goes to Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and a few other things — to cover a Canada-style Medicare-for-all system for the whole U.S., and then that much again in private money. In other words, if we could simply copy-paste Canada’s universal health-care system into America, taxes would actually go down.

All that means is that America doesn’t have to worry much about costs; it has to worry about allocating existing spending properly. We already have a gigantic pool of resources dedicated to health care — about half private and half public. We just have to adjust that spending so it can support a single-payer system.

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