Elise Amendola/AP Photo
Democratic presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren speaks at a campaign event, October 29, 2019, in Laconia, New Hampshire.
Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All plan, released today, is a major step forward for the single-payer movement. Never before have the specific steps to drive down costs through the bargaining power of a sole insurance entity, and the specific ways to pay for the balance, been outlined in such thorough detail. My story on this is up at the Prospect and I urge you to read it.
Pulling this off accomplished a few things for Warren. First, it completely upended the culture of “No We Can’t” in think tanks and policy shops around D.C. There are a few creative bits in here that likely won’t happen—realizing savings from immigration reform means combining the entire extremely controversial health care and immigration bills into one, though of course this is only 2 percent of the total revenue gap—but for the most part it makes a serious effort, and manages to pull it off without adding new taxes on the average worker. (Workers already pay significantly for health care, through general taxes that go toward health care, and Medicare payroll taxes.)
Second, it wraps the question of Medicare for All in a worldview, rooted in the concept of providing economic and social freedom and security to all Americans. Just through figuring out the financing, it incorporates a number of other policy preferences outside of health care, including comprehensive immigration reform, banking regulation, initiatives to fight inequality, antitrust enforcement, boosts to unionization, tax compliance, anti-corruption measures, military spending, and more. It really reflects an entire agenda and value set that prioritizes working families over the oligarchs currently running roughshod over America.
Third, the political goal here is to pivot. You can quibble with the design and the numbers if you want. You can say that the employer head tax, which fills a substantial amount of the revenue gap, should actually be a payroll tax. You can say that the Federal Reserve should make up the difference. You can definitely say that this is a cave to a bunch of right-wing fiscal scolds who don’t understand economics and who won’t stop their nonsense. But Warren’s plan is to turn the question on its head. It’s now up to everyone else in the race to explain their solution to the crisis of the uninsured and underinsured, the crisis of medical bankruptcies and unnecessary deaths, the crisis of a nation paying nearly twice as much for health care as the rest of the developed world, with worse results. She can lead on values instead of financing.
Again, my full write-up of this detailed plan, and analysis of the politics of it, is here.
