Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $21 trillion mistake - The Washington Post

Dec. 4, 2018 at 3:00 a.m. EST



Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $21 trillion mistake - The Washington Post: “$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.”

— Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), in a tweet, Dec. 2, 2018

The Defense Department is awash with money. So much money that neither the staff nor 1,200 auditors could make sense of where it all went. (The Pentagon recently failed its first big audit in history.)

Enter Ocasio-Cortez. She supports expanding Medicare to people under 65, what’s known as single-payer or Medicare-for-all. But the big question is how to pay for all that health care. According to an estimate from the Urban Institute, the price tag on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare-for-all proposal would be $32 trillion over 10 years.

Maybe the Pentagon has a few trillion dollars lying around somewhere, as Ocasio-Cortez implied? Let’s find out.

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