an idea that was from the fringes of the far left. now you have two of the leading candidates, this as a central part of their platform. and if we can show the numbers from the latest iowa polling which just came out today, iowa one of the early voting states, look where warren and sanders are. it shows that these kinds of proposals have appeal among democratic voters. yeah, there s a piece of the democratic audience that liked this. a couple other realities here. first, jim, this is a very plausible thing to raise $20.5 trillion. $24.5 trillion is at the very low end of estimates of what medicare for all will cost. the urban institute just estimated it will cost $32 trillion over ten years. and you know, she will maybe the transition plan helps keep down the cost but a lot of the way she keeps down the cost, deep in the plan, she severely cuts rates reimbursement rates for providers, including hospitals down to about what medicare now pays which is a lot
less than private insurance and a lot of questions about even with some adjustments she talks about, whether hospitals can survive at that level of reimbursement. if you raise the level of reimbursement you raise the cost and the tax that you have to then summon. by the way, even $20.5 trillion is nearly as much as the personal income tax, the total personal income tax is projected to raise over the next decade. and on the politics it s worth noting that support for this idea is does exist in the democratic caucus, but it s stalled out at about half of house democrats. only about half of house democrats are supporting the legislation to do this. and i was in a group of columnists that interviewed nancy pelosi earlier this week. and she said maybe medicare for all is a destination but it s not a place to start. so the prospects of this, even with a democratic president, would remain very, you know, uncertain. listen, a little more than a year ago, less than a year, the whole governm
the price tag that she puts on this is $20.5 trillion in new federal spending over the course of ten years. how does she get to that 20.5 trillion. we are talking about things as you see on the screen like employer contribution kinning counting for half the total. and other things like taxes additional take home pay, if employees are no longer having to pay for premiums out of the paycheck, that means paycheck will go up. take home pay goes up. that would be subject to tax. and then other things like taxing big corporations and the financial sector. and beaching up the wealth tax, a plan she already put out. but now she amends that and says people with wealth of more than $1.0 billion will now have to pay more than she initially envisioned in the release of her wealth tax. a lot of numbers here that analyst and experts are going to have to go through and certainly the critics will continue to say that this is not realistic. i will just finally note, though
and the big question that she has been asked since she hasn t been able to answer is will middle class tax goes up under medicare for all? today she is saying no. she writes, we don t need to raise taxes on the middle class by one penny to finance medicare for all. now politically speaking, this is a very interesting split screen because, of course, medicare for all is written by bernie sanders and sanders himself said this week he doesn t believe it s yet necessary to put out a full detained plan explaining how to pay for it. and warren saying it s important to fight any misinformation out there by putting out this detailed plan. let s talk about the numbers. the price tag is $20.5 trillion of new federal spending over ten years. she is saying that this will be paid for in a number of different ways as you see on the screen there, including employers continuing to make their contributions. that accounts for at least around half of the total. and then there are things like cracking dow
could envision a scenario where that transition is longer than what bernie sanders envisioned. so we just don t have the answer to that. $20 trillion. that s a thousand billion for each of those trillions. mj lee, thank you. christine romans and senior political analyst ron brownstein joining me now along with mj. christine, first, help me with the math here. what sticks out to me is more than half of this $20.5 trillion figure is going to be covered by corporations it looks like if you put the numbers back on the screen. $8.8 trillion from employers. 5.8 from financial companies and big corporations, large corporations. first of all, they re not going to like that. no, they re not. when you look at these numbers, is this realistic? does this math add up? this is why she s not popular along the c suite elites. they look at her trying to remake capitalism and health care and they are the ones who are going to have to pay for it. you look at cracking down on tax