The Economic Myths Democrats Peddled at Debate

At their debate in Ohio Tuesday night, Democratic presidential candidates emphasized what’s wrong with the economy. That’s not at all surprising: The party out of the White House typically magnifies problems, and progressives are predisposed to think that the market has created a lot of them that government can fix. Sometimes this impulse leads to the identification of real abuses by business and improvements in public policy to curb them. Sometimes, though, ideology cuts its tether to reality. That’s what happened over and over on the debate stage. The candidates peddled one myth after another.

Myth No. 1: Medical bills cause 500,000 bankruptcies a year. This line is a favorite of Senator Bernie Sanders, and he repeated it at the debate — this time saying that the half a million bankruptcies were all the result of cancer alone. But that number appears to be vastly exaggerated. A 2018 study found that medical events caused only 4 percent of bankruptcies, which would yield a number closer to 30,000 cases. And even those bankruptcies were in many cases caused more by lost work due to illness than by medical bills. Sanders’s suggestion that his Medicare for All plan would have prevented all those bankruptcies is therefore mistaken.