Now that Elizabeth Warren has a plan for how she’s going to 'pay for' Medicare For All, perhaps we can talk more about whether her moderate opponents have plans for ending medical bankruptcies, writes EricLevitz
Photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images Elizabeth Warren has an excellent plan for how she can provide debate audiences with politically palatable answers to questions about how she would finance Medicare for All.Fortunately, at this point in the arc of history, the former is probably more important.
1.) Insist that his will reduce the middle class’s overall household costs by saving them more on health care than they’ll need to fork over to Uncle Sam. Warren, by contrast, had refused to explicitly concede that giving non-millionaire Americans premium- and deductible-free access to health care would require charging them more in taxes. She didn’t rule out such tax hikes; her rebuttals in the last debate actually implied an openness to tax increases, so long as the middle class’s overall costs did not go up. But her approach read as evasive, allowing Sanders to claim the mantle of honest broker, while Joe Biden & Co.
Second, she takes the money employers are currently spending on private insurance coverage and redirects 98 percent of it to the government’s coffers — a maneuver that pays for nearly half her program’s new spending. At that point, all she needs is a measly $11 trillion in new revenue sources — a hole small enough to fill with a grab bag of aggressive tax hikes on the rich, modest cuts to defense spending, and other relatively popular means.
There are other substantive issues with Warren’s plan. You can read more detailed, critical overviews of Warren’s plan from Vox’s Ezra Klein and the People’s Policy Project’s Matt Bruenig. But the basic issue is that her plan privileges the public’s status quo bias over optimal policy design.
Whether this gambit will prove successful remains to be seen. It’s possible that her opponents will find ways of making her policy’s substantive flaws politically salient. But at first blush, the drawbacks of Warren’s plan don’t seem to lend themselves to debate-stage soundbites. It’s very hard to accessibly explain in 30 seconds why directly reallocating existing corporate spending on health care creates problems.
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