I'm guessing that you're speaking not of an estimate by a renowned economist, and instead about the recent propaganda piece from the Koch-funded conservative propagandists from the Mercatus Center. The estimate they came up with would involve a per-capita cost for "Medicare for all" of $3.26 trillion per year ($32.6 trillion over a decade). Obviously, since that team effectively works for the Koch Brothers, and earns its income by feeding into the media studies that serve the interests of the Koch Brothers, they're highly motivated to overestimate the costs.
So, how realistic is $3.26 trillion per year? Well, the population is 328 million and growing at a pace of about 0.76% per year. So the average population over the next ten years will be 342 million. Thus, they're estimating a cost of $9,939 per person. Now look here:
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org...-spend-half-much-per-person-health-u-s-spends
As you can see, their estimate for what Medicare-for-all would cost over twice as much as Canada's system (which essentially has Medicare for all) costs. Does that seem realistic to you -- that the US would spend over twice as much as our neighbor to the North for the same thing? Australia is another country that has Medicare for all (even using that same name). Again, Mercatus estimates it would cost well over twice as much to do that here. Why?
I think the obvious answer is that Meratus needed to show a very high price tag to make their funders happy. When your continued employment requires you to find that Medicare for all would be very expensive, you find a way to say that, right?
But, let's even take that at face value, and pretend that it really did cost $9,939 per person. As you can see in the link above, that would be about a 4% savings relative to what we currently spend as a country. The cost would be shifted from the private sector to the public sector, but would drop by 4% overall, EVEN ACCORDING TO THE RIGHT-WING MERCATUS PROPAGANDISTS! And that's when comparing the average annual cost from the next ten years to the current annual cost. Since our costs tend to rise at far more than the rate of inflation, the savings would certainly be larger than that. Over the next ten years, if we make no policy change, the average cost per capita for us is going to be way above the $10,348 referenced in that link. So, even if we could only drop that cost to $9,939 per person, the way the right-wing Mercatus Center thinks we will, that would be a huge savings, net.
Do the math. Even using the Mercatus Center exaggerated cost, it'll cost $3.26 trillion per year. But that's the total cost for covering everyone, and lots of people are already covered by federal employee and retiree healthcare, Medicare, and Medicaid. Subtract the existing cost of those, and the net added cost is only about half that. As I said, you could cover it simply by hiking overall taxation to a level that was still beneath the OECD average, and well beneath the average for wealthy nations.
Remove the cost for private health insurance and the other huge out-of-pocket expenses people currently have, and more people would be able to pay taxes, the same way as is true in pretty much every other wealthy nation.
Run the numbers yourself and you should see what I mean.
