Ocasio-Cortez is apparently desperate to make a legit argument on how to pay for Medicare-For-All. So desperate she’s making more dumb statements about it that even the liberal media can’t swallow:
FOX NEWS – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was roundly fact-checked this week — by even liberal-leaning publications — for suggesting a reported $21 trillion in Pentagon accounting errors could fund most of her proposed “Medicare for all” health care program.
Ocasio-Cortez, one of the highest-profile figures among the new wave of liberal Democrats entering Congress in 2019, cited a Nation story about how $21 trillion in “Pentagon financial transactions” between 1998 and 2015 could not be documented or explained.
“$21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.”
$21 TRILLION of Pentagon financial transactions “could not be traced, documented, or explained.”
$21T in Pentagon accounting errors. Medicare for All costs ~$32T.
That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.
And that’s before our premiums. https://t.co/soT6GSmDSG
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) December 2, 2018
The so-called 21 trillion cited by the hard-left Nation report isn’t even about real money, but about the Pentagon changing their numbers to hide money they haven’t spent. As Fox News put is, the “crux of the story is not so much misspending, as an alleged lack of transparency by the Pentagon.”
But multiple fact-checkers gave a clear verdict to Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion that Pentagon accounting errors could largely cover the costs: it wasn’t true.
As left-wing Vox explained: “The Pentagon’s accounting errors are genuinely enormous, but they’re also just accounting errors — they don’t represent actual money that can be spent on something else.”
Underscoring the disconnect between the original story and Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter claim, Vox continued: “Indeed, there simply hasn’t been $21 trillion in (nominal) Defense Department spending across the entirety of American history.”
The New York Times noted that the $21 trillion is the value of adjustments made to Pentagon records that couldn’t be traced: “That is not the same thing as $21 trillion in spending.”
Ocasio-Cortez later made an additional note that her central point concerned the level of scrutiny applied to health care proposals versus, say, military spending: “To clarify, this is to say that we only demand fiscal details w/ health+edu, rarely elsewhere.”
“The point, I think, was more about how we care so little about the ‘how do you pay for it’ when we are talking about war and military spending,” her spokesman told The Washington Post. “It’s only when we are talking about investing in the physical and economic well-being of our citizenry that we become concerned with the price tags.”
The Post, however, still described the original tweet as a “swing and a miss!” and awarded her claim “four Pinnochios.”
Of course the truth is that they can’t pay for Medicare-For-All without killing the military and taxing the heck out of the American people – and it will still be a terrible system. Which is why it’s a bad idea to begin with.
But socialists like Ocasio-Cortez still want people to live in a fantasy world about government-run healthcare so don’t expect her to admit the truth anytime soon, if ever.