Late Sunday night, just hours before the fourth Democratic presidential debate, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders unveiled what's probably the purest expression to date of his unreconstructed 1970s radicalism: a plan for "universal" single-payer health care in the United States.

Proudly titled "Medicare-for-All," the Sanders scheme would eliminate the private insurance industry and establish a single, federally run insurance pool open to all.

Sanders promises a healthcare utopia – a future of "no more co-pays, no more deductibles and no more fighting with insurance companies." During Sunday's debate, the candidate claimed that his health care plan would "save the average middle-class family thousands of dollars a year."

This is complete nonsense. Every other single-payer system around the world delivers subpar care at astronomical cost. Worse still, the multitrillion-dollar tax hikes – that's "trillion," with a "t" – that Sanders has proposed to finance his single-payer monstrosity would decimate the American economy.

Read the full article at U.S. News & World Report: The Ugly Reality of Single-Payer