Bernie Wants Medicare for All and Wants to Take 75% of Your Income to Pay for It

The Tweet Heard Round the Wallet

Bernie Sanders is out here tweeting like a guy who just found a $20 bill in an old jacket. Lower Medicare eligibility to 55. Cover all kids. Add dental, vision, hearing. Pass it with 51 votes. Let’s go.

I have one question. Just one. Where is the money coming from?

Because here is the answer, and you are not going to like it. The Congressional Budget Office priced out the broadest version of Medicare for All, complete with Bernie’s full wish list, and landed on $3 trillion in additional federal spending per year by 2030. We are already $40 trillion in debt. We are already running $2 trillion annual deficits. The interest payments alone are eating us alive. And Bernie’s answer is to add another $3 trillion annually.

Your Paycheck Is the Plan

This is not abstract budget talk. This is your money. The funding mechanism requires an additional 21.4% in combined payroll taxes, split as 10.7% from employees and 10.7% from employers. No cap on taxable wages. Here is what that looks like in real dollars:

• $50,000 salary: You pay $5,350 more. Your employer pays $5,350 more.
• $100,000 salary: $10,750 more from each side
• $150,000 salary: $16,050 from each side
• $250,000 salary: $26,750 from each side
• $500,000 salary: $53,500 from each side

Now add your existing federal and state income taxes on top of that. As a business owner who pays both sides of payroll taxes, I am looking at somewhere around 70 to 75% of my income going to taxes. And we have not even touched property taxes or sales taxes yet.

Somebody please explain to me how any person, in good conscience, believes it is acceptable to confiscate three quarters of what another human being earns.

The Obamacare Blueprint Already Told Us How This Ends

We do not have to guess how government-run healthcare performs. We lived it. The Affordable Care Act promised savings of $2,500 per family. You could keep your doctor. The deficit would go down. Every single promise evaporated.

Here is what we actually got:

• 80% of physicians are now employees, stripped of their independence and autonomy
• Family premiums have climbed 150% since 2006
• Healthcare administrators up 156%, because that is where government money always flows
• One in five in-network claims denied
• One in three out-of-network claims denied
• Insurance companies posting record profits while patients get rejected and doctors get pay cuts
• Another physician reimbursement reduction coming in 2027

Doctors I work with, people who spent a decade in school and took on mountains of debt, are struggling. The system crushed them. And the proposal on the table is to give that same system total control.

The Lie at the Center of the Argument

The pitch for Medicare for All always comes wrapped in compassion. Healthcare is a right. Nobody should go broke getting sick. I do not disagree with the sentiment. The system is genuinely broken and people are genuinely suffering.

But here is what the advocates never acknowledge:

• Government involvement created the broken system we have now
• More bureaucracy means more administrators, not more doctors
• Taxing employers more means you stop getting raises, full stop
• When physician reimbursements fall further, more doctors leave medicine
• A 75% effective tax rate does not just hurt the wealthy. It kills small business owners, independent professionals, and anyone trying to build something

The question is not whether healthcare needs to be fixed. It does. The question is whether you trust the institution that gave you $40 trillion in debt and 156% more healthcare administrators to be the ones who fix it.

I do not. And you should not either.