Go big or go home — that seems to be the adage on which socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has decided to stake his campaign. On Wednesday, Sanders unveiled his latest version of “Medicare for All,” his scheme for single-payer health care. He estimated it could cost up to $40 trillion over 10 years, which blows past the $32 trillion estimate outsiders calculated after Sanders first began peddling his plan. Previously, Sanders admitted that he would raise taxes across the board to pay for this government power grab, but now that he’s upped the price he’s downplaying that broad tax increase and focusing on the rich paying more.

This massive sum of $40 trillion only exposes Sanders’s apparent ignorance of basic economics. As Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw observes, “Forty trillion over ten years is an average of four trillion per year. Does anyone recall what the entire budget of the United States federal government was for 2018? It was 4.094 trillion dollars. So Sanders is casually talking about expending the equivalent of our entire budget on his health care plan. (While simultaneously outlawing private health insurance and wiping out an entire industry.)” Well, he is a socialist.

Nevertheless, Sanders insists that his plan is not “absurd,” asserting, “What the most serious economists tell us [is] that if we do nothing to fundamentally change the health care system, which is what Joe [Biden] was talking about, keeping it as it is, we’ll be spending something like $50 trillion over a 10-year period.” Biden has released a plan recommending an expansion of ObamaCare, which he claims would cost an additional $750 billion over 10 years.

The fact of the matter is, this is exactly what conservatives warned against when Nancy Pelosi and company were forcing ObamaCare onto the backs of the American people. We warned that ObamaCare was merely setting up an excuse to push for a single-payer, government takeover of America’s health system. And here we are, facing that very prospect.