This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 1st, 2018. I'm Keelib Brown.

Bernie Sanders Medicare for All proposal might cost as much as 32 trillion new dollars over 10 years.

That would translate to a doubling of federal income tax revenue.

That's that

expanding Medicare, the program for some.

Charles to begin, you estimate that expanding Medicare,

the program for older Americans,

to cover all Americans that it would cost something over 30 trillion

dollars over the next 10 years and would require a federal spending increase of what 50 60 70%?

Well all right I'll try to encapsulate the various numbers but but thanks for the

plug for the study but the top line estimate was a increase in federal spending of 32.6 trillion over the first full

10 full years of implementation.

For perspective, I mean that's a very big number difficult for people to wrap their minds around.

So one tidbit I put in the paper was that even if you were to double all currently projected federal

individual income and corporate income tax collections that would not be enough to finance

the added costs of this proposal and again this is not that's not that's not the's not the total cost. That's the costs over and above what the federal government is already paying on health care.

So that's the delta. But important caveats should be attached even to that number.

Basically, in the course of doing this study,

I was basically scoring the sponsor's intent

or fondest hopes, basically.

And so I was assuming the things that the legislation was intended to do including

very substantial reductions in administrative costs, very substantial reductions in drug prices,

...