Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare For All Plan Is A Disaster
Let’s start with its $300 billion hole.
On Friday, amid public pressure about her vagueness surrounding her healthcare policy, Elizabeth Warren released a 19 page proposal describing exactly how she would implement her Medicare for All plan.
While it’s undoubtedly a good thing that Warren is now being transparent over her healthcare policy, taking away a major point critics could make about her, releasing it may have been the wrong choice, because it is a hot mess.
Although the proposal does address some of the biggest concerns when it comes to Medicare for All, such as how much the government is going to pay doctors given current Medicare rates, and it does seem to have some good ideas for how the entire operation will be financed, it breaks down when you look at the details.
Let’s just take a quick look at how much Warren wants to spend with this new proposal.
According to the proposal itself, Warren estimates that overall healthcare spending by Americans would go up by $52 trillion over the next decade under her plan, or $5.2 trillion every year. She also estimates that federal healthcare spending specifically would go up by $20.5 trillion in the next decade, or $2 trillion a year.
For reference, in 2019 the federal budget was $4.45 trillion, meaning that Warren’s proposed Medicare for All spending would increase the budget by 50%. This gets even worse when you recognize that the current budget already had a deficit of $960 billion in 2019, meaning we can’t pay for what we already have, and Warren’s plan would just pile onto that.
But, of course, Warren does have plans to cover that spending. One of the main points of contention during Warren’s campaign was that she wouldn’t say whether or not her plan would raise taxes on the middle class, while Bernie Sanders did.
Warren’s new plan reveals that she doesn’t plan to tax the middle class at all. Instead, Warren wants to instate a 6% wealth tax on large corporations, which would raise $600 billion, and she wants to increase tax enforcement, which would raise an additional $230 billion a year.
She also believes she would raise another $900 billion a year from employers who would now have decreased spending on things like employee health insurance, meaning they would keep that money they would’ve spent and it would be paid to the government in taxes.
Now, all of this is incredibly idealistic, but let’s use them for the sake of argument to see how much Warren would raise overall.
If Warren were to instate all of these tax increases, she would raise an additional $1.73 trillion a year in taxes. That’s good, but Medicare for All is $2 trillion in spending a year, meaning just this proposal on its own would leave a deficit of nearly $300 billion every year.
I don’t like being a fiscal hawk, and I’m all for increased spending when it works for the benefit of society, but we have to face that Warren’s Medicare for All plan is poorly conceived. Even using the most generous estimates for taxes and spending, her plan would still create a massive deficit on its own, and it won’t be on its own.
Warren has a slew of other plans to invest in clean energy and forgive student loan debt and create free public college, all of which also require vast sums of money to instate. While these plans will be beneficial, it seems like with some of them Warren has bitten off more than she can chew.
There is certainly a more workable version of this plan. Pete Buttigieg already has his Medicare for All Who Want It proposal, which wouldn’t do away with private insurance like Warren’s would, allowing for costs to be far lower.
According to his campaign, Medicare for All Who Want It would cost $150 billion a year, and he would raise $140 billion of that by rolling back the Trump tax cuts. The other $10 billion of that, he says, would come from federal cost savings that would result from negotiating lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.
Obviously Buttigieg’s plan isn’t perfect, but it is fiscally manageable and more practically usable than Warren’s.
While I like Warren, and I want to see some version of Medicare for All implemented, her current plan is incredibly flawed. Having a financial hole that large makes it unsustainable in the long term, and the situation gets worse when you look at all of Warren’s policies together.
It’s good that Warren has released her healthcare plan, and we’re no longer in the dark about that, but she needs to move on from here. What she has is really only a starting point, and if we want a plan we can actually put into place, Warren needs to go back to the drawing board.
