Blahous's study absolutely, positively does say that the Sanders plan as written will save the American people $2 trillion. Sanders didn't mention the more expensive Mercatus plan because it is not his plan. Vague speculation about future political negotiations has nothing whatsoever to do with the facts of the Sanders proposal, nor the empirical contents of the Mercatus study.

But that's not even the worst part.

As part of its PR rollout of the paper, Mercatus bought buying ads for Facebook in D.C. promoting a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which Blahous baldly misrepresents his own paper, writing that the Sanders bill would "immediately and dramatically cut provider payment rates by roughly 40 percent."



As noted above, this is absolutely false, because only about half of people are on private insurance. Medicare payments would stay the same, while Medicaid and uninsured payments would go up. But Kessler, after talking to Blahous, initially swallowed this characterization, writing in his first article that providers "would face an immediate cut of 40 percent in their payments."

He was forced to correct that article (for that and several other factual errors)