John Minchillo/AP Photo
Presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren speaks during a Democratic primary debate at Otterbein University, in Westerville, Ohio, October 15, 2019.
Elizabeth Warren is now dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on her own Medicare for All plan, which she has pledged to release shortly. As David Dayen astutely notes today, the plans put forth by Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’s primary opponents—chiefly, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg—will, if they’re any good, end up costing about as much as the Medicare for All proposals they’ve disparaged.
B&B’s emphasis on the taxes that will fund Medicare for All (and, not that they admit it, their own plans, too) misses the fact that the great majority of Americans pay far more for their private insurance than they would in higher taxes, though what they pay now is largely concealed from them because their employer routinely takes it out of their pay. (Of course, if we do go to Medicare for All, workers will have to fight to compel their bosses to transfer the savings to them, rather than divert it into dividends and buybacks.)
How can Elizabeth Warren address the major savings workers can win by shifting to Medicare for All? My friend Steve Tarzynski, who’s president of the California Physicians Alliance, suggests something like the following:
Right now, you and your family pay $18,000 a year in premiums for employer-sponsored insurance that doesn’t even cover everything and that you could lose at any time. Plus another $2,000 in deductibles before it even kicks in and another $1,000 in co-pays. That’s about $21,000 every year for a basically defective product. That’s the “private tax” you’re paying right now. And your choice of doctor is restricted and you can even lose access to your doctor at any time. All that would go away with Medicare for All—no more premiums, no more deductibles, and no more co-pays. And all the care you and your family need will be covered and can never be taken away. You can choose any doctor you want. Yes. You’ll pay $5,000 more in taxes for all of that. But it will put $16,000 back in your pocket. And it doesn’t even include the share of the premium that your employer pays now that you could get back in wages and salary. Would you settle for that?
And to my fellow Democrats on the stage here who oppose Medicare for All, who are you really working for? Because what you propose is exactly what the insurance industry wants.
That’s so good I got nothing to add. Would work not just for Warren but for Bernie, too.
