there's a fundamental flaw in the reasoning: if single payer healthcare plans save money, why do we need higher tax rates?
If your taxes increase to say 40% but health insurance is included your taxes have nominally gone up 20%, but down 20% if you consider non-tax costs that were folded into your taxes.
As anyone who's moved between countries can tell you, it doesn't make any sense to just consider what the tax rate is, instead you have to think about fixed costs (health care, housing, food, transportation, ...), deduct that from your pre-tax pay, and you're left with your effective taxation as it were.
Administrative changes in the government can increase your taxes but have the effect of increasing your take-home pay, that's effectively what Sanders is proposing.
There's no flaw in this reasoning, on the contrary you seem to have the fundamental flaw in your reasoning of assuming that the only way for the government to save you money is to reduce your tax rate.
Your typical middle class single person is now spending $300 to $400 per month on health insurance (employer sponsored is closer to $100 per month, but that's merely subsidization), and you want to shift them into single payer, then you have to recover that $300 to $400 via taxation.
The median in the US has an effective income tax of about 3% to 5%. Put another way, putting all of that toward their new single payer insurance, wouldn't come close to covering how much they'll cost you (and that's before getting into family cost structures).
Citation needed.
There's "fees", "taxes" and all sorts of hidden ways that eat into the middle class. Not only that, but how much "Fees" were in the eggs you bought? None, right? Not really: they're just bundled in and hidden.
Ever get a speeding ticket? That's a fucking tax. Property tax, car "license plates" - tax. Gas has taxes, and a lot of them. As does alcohol. And then there's sales tax- just because you sold something. Hell, there's taxes for dying.
But myopically, it looks small. I'd wager that these 'little bits' here and there by far exceeds the percent paid in taxes than the top 1%.. and we know it hurts the middle class far worse.
Lets be real here: any money that's leaving my pocket that goes towards "compliance", "fees", "fines", "tickets", or what have you is Tax.
Now, I don't have a problem with tax itself (as a concept). I get that services need to be paid for, and that's us.
But what I want to know, is out of my paycheck, how much really is taxed? No one can answer that.
You eliminate the overhead of dealing with disparate billing systems. You can more easily find waste and fraud since all data is flowing into one place in a single comparable format. And, most importantly, you have the power of being the only buyer in a market which can pretty much dictate what price they will pay as long as it doesn't drive the providers directly out of business.
But it is disingenuous for OP to suggest that because taxes go up it is an overall worse situation for those paying those taxes, implying there is no way they would save money.
No, we're not.
"Gallup reported in July 2014 that the uninsured rate among adults 18 and over fell from 18.0% in Q3 2013 to 13.4% by Q2 2014."
More Americans are insured today than ever before, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population. This doesn't mean that the ACA is responsible, but saying that we have the same number of under/uninsured people is simply false.
That's untrue.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/182348/uninsured-rate-dips-first-...
>According to an ongoing NHIS / CDC study the current uninsured rate of 9.2% for 2015 is the lowest in over 50 years.
It started at 18%.
Everyone outside of Medicare is in private insurance, which is regulated but not "firmly under government control".
> raising costs substantially,
While there is debate about whether the ACA has slowed the rate of healthcare inflation in its short life, there is no evidence that it has "raised costs substantially" across the system.
> literally fining people for being unable to afford more expensive plans
Fining people for choosing not to pay for health care if they are able. Everyone needs health care, most everyone gets (possibly lacking) healthcare when they need it, and it costs money.
The previous solution, brought to you by Ronald Reagan, was the mandate that hospital emergency rooms couldn't turn people away who needed help. A humane concept, but poor social or economic policy for addressing the healthcare system in the large.
And it reduce the problem considerably (though less than it would have without the bizarre Supreme Court decision that Congress can't actually set the terms on which states get federal Medicaid funds, and particularly change the rules on Medicaid to require states accepting federal money to expand coverage -- which resulted in a number of states opting out of the expansion in Medicaid coverage that was intended to cover the lowest-income portion of the uninsured population not already covered by Medicaid -- the higher-income segment was addressed by the exchange-and-subsidy system.)
> After thrusting much of the health system firmly under government control, raising costs substantially, and literally fining people for being unable to afford more expensive plans, we're left with ... the same number of un- & under-insured people.
Actually, a much smaller number, but still more than many people would like.