Back in January 2016, when the Democratic primary was in full gear, Kenneth Thorpe, health care policy professor from Emory University, published a devastating claim.

He suggested that US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders's estimate for his proposed single payer health care plan was wildly off, and that it would cost almost a trillion more in spending per year than initially estimated. By implication, implementing single payer in the US would be a fiscal and possibly even economic catastrophe.

As a concerned citizen following the election closely, I was curious about such a claim, which went against the intuition of just about any other experiment with universal health care in the developed world. Unfortunately, Mr. Thorpe did not present any actual documentation of how reached those numbers, and when I emailed him as well as Dylan Matthews, the original writer of the article I read, I did not receive any response.

So I set out to do it myself, hoping to finish before the Iowa caucus. And the results were interesting! The project took about 40 hours total.

First, I gathered a wide variety of data from sources such as the Congressional Budget Office and insights from professionals who had studied the health care industry for years, even decades. I provide citations for all of my initial estimates, and mark assumptions (such as growth rates) in blue.

Next, I used very conservative projections to try and replicate Mr. Thorpe's results (the business as usual case).

Then, I decided to make a more optimistic approach. I aggressively attacked big pharma's margins. Same with hospitals. And loosened assumptions on growth rates.

I ended up coming with a valuation at least in the ballpark of the estimate from the Sanders campaign.

Finally, I added sensitivity analysis through What-If modeling, hoping to find out how the deficit would change as two critical assumptions changed.

There were even some scenarios where my projections were less expensive than the estimate of the Sanders campaign!

This was a useful intellectual exercise that I did not want to initially publish in the interests of being politically sensitive. Now we have someone in power who has a very real chance of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, which was a light market-based reform first championed by the Heritage Foundation in the mid-1990s, and which is several steps behind single payer health care.

We do not want to go back to the health care industry before the Affordable Care Act. People with conditions were denied left and right as an excuse. Many were uninsured. Americans were incentivized to not seek treatment until they had to go to the emergency room, which the taxpayer then paid.

So hope you found this as intellectually stimulating and informative as I had! And if you want to make comments, revisions, or critiques, I am open to it.

Edit history: edited to be even more professional and to make a good faith effort to avoid even the appearance of political commentary.