By Daniel Funke, PolitiFact Staff Writer Feb 25, 2020
Several conservative pages on Facebook are trying to discredit the plans with bad math.
The math, the post claims, works out like this: A person making Sanders’ $15 an hour minimum wage would earn $31,200 a year. But because of Sanders’ 52% tax to pay for Medicare for All, they’d pay $16,224 right back in a new health care tax. The upshot: The worker is only actually earning $7.20 an hour, or $14,976 a year after taxes.
One Feb. 20 post published in a Bill O’Reilly fan page shows some calculations of Sanders’ plans. It cites a proposed $15 federal minimum wage that Sanders, I-Vt., brought up during the Feb. 19 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas.
Sanders first introduced Medicare for All, which would cover every American’s medical bills completely, in April 2019. According to the Urban Institute, the health care plan would increase federal spending by $2.8 trillion in 2020, and $34 trillion over 10 years.