me time because it could be cruel to individuals in certain situations while still being the best solution for the greater good and the long term.

And another way to look at this is the child view versus the adult view. The child view is I want candy. Well you know adult says you should have your dinner, there's a nutrition wall. Don't eat candy. And then the child will hear all those good reasons and say but I want candy, I want candy. So that's sort of the view that incentives are cruel. You know making people do things or denying them services, etc. It's definitely cruel if that's all you looked at is the impact on the individual. But if you look at the system it's the kindest system to the most people even though individually it could be quite cruel. So it's an adult view versus a child view.

I'm getting increasingly frustrated with Bernie and the people who want to fix healthcare at being terrible at making their own argument. In fact they are so bad that I wasn't entirely sure what the argument was until today. Let me see if you knew this. And by the way at least half of you are gonna say, Scott you idiot we knew that, and anybody who doesn't know that you're not paying attention or you're not too bright. But let me confess I didn't know this.

So this is part of Bernie's plan. Did you know that in Bernie's plan where there would be universal healthcare and all you'd have to do is go to whatever doctor you wanted, did you know that you wouldn't lose anything you already have? In other words you would just go to your same doctor except instead of paying with one insurance card you would just hand him the government card. But otherwise your life would be the same.

Now yeah, I'm looking at the comments. Somebody says right, they knew that. And then the very next comment is I didn't know that. Didn't you? Imagine if you're consuming just the media from the right. Didn't you imagine that Bernie was going to blow everything up and it was going to be some kind of government program? But indeed all he's doing is getting rid of some bureaucracy. Instead of these big private health insurance companies, just the insurance part about the healthcare part, but just the insurance part, Bernie's plan would make that industry just go away, which is a big deal if you're in that industry obviously or you have stock in that issue. But he's just making it go away and he would replace it with a card that you could just take anywhere, go to any facility, make an appointment, here's my government card, and get the same doctor and the same services you would have now.

Did I not just explain that better than Bernie ever has? Somebody is saying that's BS, we've heard you can keep your doctors before. No, that was Obamacare. Obamacare was more restrictive. Bernie is now pushing beyond Obamacare. Bernie is saying let's get rid of all this unnecessary paperwork and overhead and profit from the insurance companies. And how about you can just go anywhere you want and get any service that's available. You just have to make an appointment like everybody else. Isn't that better than the current system if you were just a consumer hearing it for the first time?

Here's another one. You have heard of course Bernie's saying that you would pay for his universal healthcare. He would pay it by raising taxes on billionaires and their financial transactions. Now that's pretty good. All right, if all he's doing is taking a billionaire's hundreds of millions of dollars financial transactions and charging more, well the billionaire is making let's say 12% return instead of 18% return, doesn't even notice it, right? The billionaire can't even tell the difference. Still a billionaire. I made 12% this year instead of 18% because my taxes were higher. Whatever it is.

So that part of Bernie's plan I say to myself that's not bad. Even if I were a billionaire I don't know if I would complain about that much because I wouldn't know the difference. Literally I wouldn't be able to tell.

But then there's this other part that Bernie completely screws the pooch on. And watching him do this wrong time after time again just makes me lose confidence in him. And I've said this before. I say it way too much because my book *Loserthink* is entirely about this. That if you don't have experience in different domains you've got some real gaps in your ability to understand the world but also in your ability to explain it to other people.

I'm going to explain Bernie's healthcare plan better than Bernie has ever explained it. And I'm a little afraid to do this because I'm gonna change your mind. Now that doesn't mean I'll change you from not wanting Bernie's healthcare plan to wanting it, but I'm definitely gonna change a lot of your minds from that is crazy to oh I didn't know that. Watch this.

So part of the complaint about Bernie's plan is it will raise taxes on the middle class. And even Bernie accepts that's true. But he waves his hand and says you know you'll save some money in other ways. Is that good persuasion? Yeah your taxes will go up but you know I'll save you money because your healthcare is free. Is that good? Well it's true. It's true meaning that is the plan. He promotes it.

Let me give you some numbers on it. I just heard these today for the first time. So he wants to add an extra 4% tax. Let's say you're a middle class person and what you make over $29,000. The first $29,000 no tax, no extra tax on that. And so let's say you've got a middle class family that makes a combined $100,000 of income. Only the $70,000 of that would be taxed at 4%. So let's just say that it would cost them $2,800 extra in taxes. But they wouldn't have to pay their own healthcare anymore. How much were they paying? Well it depends. If it's me I'm paying something like $18,000 a year. Less, right, because I'm a small business and I pay my own healthcare. If I didn't have to I would save $18,000.

Now let's say I have a small business and I was only making $100,000 a year. I would save $18,000 but I'd have to pay $2,800. Now because every situation is different you can't really take an average for that, can you? Because there are no two people who have the same write-offs and income and all that stuff. But you should do it anyway. Bernie should just pick a number and do it anyway and say something like yeah you're gonna pay $2,800 extra in taxes but I'm gonna save you $18,000 a year if you're a small company.

Now is that true for your case? Probably not because there are no two cases the same. But how much more persuasive is it to say yeah I'll tax you $2,800 a year more if you make $100,000 from a small business but you'll save $18,000. Are you in? And oh, and what about your healthcare? And then Bernie would say exactly the same except less paperwork.

So here is me selling Bernie's plan. You have exactly the same healthcare services you have now. You get rid of a whole bunch of paperwork. You might get dental and vision on top of it. And you're gonna save something like six to one. Now is that better? Did I do a better job of selling his plan than he did? Yeah.

Now the problem of course is if you're a wage earner who has a private insurance plan through your employer, your employer gets to pocket all of those savings because your employer no longer needs to offer healthcare. It's optional. They could just stop doing it. Actually I think that in his plan they couldn't do it so they would stop doing it. So your employer could be saving millions of dollars and you're just paying $2,800 more in taxes. Do you think your employer could get away with that? If you worked for a small company and you knew that they had just saved millions of dollars because they no longer have to pay healthcare and they didn't give you a raise, you okay with that? I don't think you are okay with that. I think they're gonna give you a 4% raise right away because if they just kept the money you're gonna go to another company and get the 4% raise from the other company.

I think that the free market would force companies to give immediate raises to their employees so that they can pay for the government's extra taxes because the company just saves that money. Now they wouldn't all do it but you can leave, right? It's not easy to leave a company but you could do it.

And I also asked myself what would this do to competition? If you could more easily go to a different doctor does it make competition worse? I don't know. I'd have to see an argument on that. Because imagine if you will. Okay the current situation is let's say I've got healthcare through Kaiser so it's an HMO. That's the healthcare that I use right now. If I wanted to get a second opinion from somebody outside of my HMO it's kind of a big pain. I wouldn't know where to go, who to talk to. How does that work? Do I have to pay it out of pocket? I guess I do. So I just don't do it.

Imagine if I had free healthcare and I could go to any doctor I wanted. Would I get a second opinion from some unrelated entity? Of course I would. It's free. Why wouldn't I? Yeah I'd get a second opinion. So as long as you're getting second opinions and you're shopping, wouldn't Bernie's plan actually improve competitiveness? Because doctors would have to perform to get their share of the customers that the government would then pay for. I don't know. Maybe it makes competition worse, maybe better. I'm not really so sure.

So my point is that Bernie is just absolutely blowing it just as bad as you could blow it, his argument. And he actually has a pretty good argument. It's a pretty good argument. He's just not doing it right. But if he did, I gotta tell you, if Bernie ever gets his healthcare argument right he's going to say the billionaires are gonna benefit the most keeping everybody healthy because that's the workers that they employ, etc. So for the rich it's more like that's almost like a