Bill Hammond Profile picture
Senior Fellow for Health Policy, The @EmpireCenter. Let us not talk falsely now. The hour is getting late.

Jun 10, 2021, 6 tweets

This sentence includes one grossly misleading claim and one flatly inaccurate one.
news.littlesis.org/2020/02/14/ins…

$80B was RAND's estimated savings over *10 years.* That's about 2% of total health spending. It's based on multiple dubious assumptions, including the idea that health providers, Albany's most formidable lobbying force, will accept slower growth in payments.

RAND's first-year savings estimate was $2B or less than 1%, which is negligible given the enormous uncertainty involved in forecasting health care spending.

As for what share of New Yorkers would hypothetically save money under single-payer, RAND gave several numbers, none of which was close to 98%.

Its baseline estimate was 65%, and came with this crucial caveat:

In other words, the theoretically savings for two-thirds of New Yorkers would depend almost entirely on the other third being forced to pay more -- almost one-fifth of their income at the high end.

Here's the RAND report: rand.org/content/dam/ra…

Here is my summary of the case against single-payer:
empirecenter.org/publications/t…

And here is my more in-depth analysis:
empirecenter.org/publications/d…

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