Wikileaks: Damaging analysis of Sanders’s single payer plan was likely a coordinated Clinton hit

A search through Wikileaks’s database reveals that a week before a damaging, highly critical analysis of Bernie Sanders’s single payer healthcare plan was released by healthcare expert Kenneth Thorpe, with no disclosure of any affiliation with any campaign, the Clinton campaign was floating Thorpe’s name out as a vehicle to attack the Senator’s Medicare-for-all plan.

Thorpe’s analysis was reported by Vox on January 28th, in an article titled “Study: Bernie Sanders’s single-payer plan is almost twice as expensive as he says.” A flurry of articles and editorials touting the study followed — for example, Paul Krugman’s January 28th editorial “Single Payer Trouble,” or the New York Time’s report “Left-Leaning Economists Question Cost of Bernie Sanders’s Plans.” These articles all fed the notion that Sanders was a pie-in-the-sky, puppies and rainbow dreamer, with no real grasp on reality.

Others, however, such as single payer advocates David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, (“On Kenneth Thorpe’s Analysis of Senator Sanders’s Single-Payer Reform Plan”), claimed convincingly that Thorpe’s analysis rested on highly questionable, or flatly incorrect, assumptions and that it also contradicted previous studies that Thorpe himself had done. Sanders’s campaign, meanwhile, called the analysis “a total hatchet job.”

As it turns out, a week before Thorpe’s analysis was released, in a January 19th thread discussing the merits of attacking Sanders on healthcare, Jake Sullivan, a top Clinton advisor, floated the idea of using Thorpe to attack Sanders on healthcare:

“Team –

There is appetite for a call on health care tomorrow. The idea would be to get someone (Ken Thorpe?) to join Brian Fallon to make the following points:

Senator Sanders couldn’t have thought this through. Otherwise he would never have put forward a plan that:

- Hurts many poor people on Medicaid right now

- Hurts many working seniors

- Hurts many young people under 26 ”

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/21208

While Thorpe’s analysis hit Sanders on overall costs, it also claimed that Medicare workers, Medicaid workers, and young adult workers would all, as groups, disproportionately lose out under Sanders’s proposal. In other words, Thorpe’s analysis happened to hit the very points that the Clinton campaign wanted out there.

Throughout all of the articles on Thorpe’s analysis, by way of introduction, it was often pointed out that he was sympathetic to single payer, and so this presumably made the analysis particularly damaging, since he had a great deal of credibility on the subject, and an inclination to support a single payer system. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews wrote:

“Thorpe isn’t some right-wing critic skeptical of all single-payer proposals. Indeed, in 2006 he laid out a single-payer proposal for Vermont after being hired by the legislature, and was retained by progressive Vermont lawmakers again in 2014 as the state seriously considered single-payer, authoring a memo laying out alternative ways to expand coverage. A 2005 report he wrote estimated that a single-payer system would save $1.1 trillion in health spending from 2006 to 2015.”

But as Himmlestein and Woolhandler pointed out, one odd thing was that Thorpe’s latest analysis actually contradicted this previous work. This oddity is perfectly explained if, rather than being a good faith analysis of Sanders’s plan, the report was actually a coordinated attack from the Clinton campaign. The new evidence contained in the Podesta leak certainly suggests that this latter interpretation has a lot of merit.

Of course, the near certainty of Thorpe’s direct involvement with the campaign was never disclosed. Indeed, the exact opposite was asserted by the NYT’s Jackie Calmes in her article — which relies heavily on Thorpe’s analysis — about "left-leaning economists," "none of whom are working for Mrs. Clinton."