Exploring the benefits and drawbacks of Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare for All plan
“And when it comes to healthcare, what’s broken is obvious. A system … that crushes our families with costs they can’t possibly bear, forcing tens of millions to go without coverage or to choose between basic necessities like food, rent and health – or bankruptcy.”
Previously serving under President Obama’s administration as an advisor on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Massachusetts’ Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren is one of two women leading in the democratic run for presidency. Her run has been riddled with her strong stances on economic and environmental policy, with a 20% national polling average, just behind former Vice President Joe Biden and in front of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Some believe that her most daring policy change, her Medicare For All plan. has characterized her campaign. She claims that she can fund this program without raising taxes for the middle class, but instead increasing taxes on the “ultra rich” (people whose total wealth is more than $50 million) from 3% of their income to 6%. She estimates that the implementation of this plan would cost the country roughly “under $52 trillion over 10 years,” which she claims is how much our current healthcare program is projected to cost anyway.
Pros
Warren’s intentions behind Medicare for All reflect her strong moral perspectives.
In her plan, she states that her two non-negotiables are:
“No American should ever, ever die or go bankrupt because of health care costs,” whether it be prescription drug costs or surgery fees.
“Every American should be able to see the doctors they need and get their recommended treatments, without having to figure out who is in-network.”
Her concerns with America’s current healthcare system aren’t rooted in falsities. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American spends approximately $5,000 per person in a household in 2018. The vast reasons for this 101% increase in the amount of healthcare spending from 1984 aside, the bottom line is Warren is morally correct in this situation. No American deserves to die because they couldn’t afford paying for monthly insulin treatments or a simple surgical procedure that could’ve saved their life.
Warren also has a well thought out plan of action for potentially carrying this out. In 20 pages, she outlines the different facets of where the money would go. She wants to implement changes like having a flat rate for different hospital visits instead of paying different amounts depending on the services, which would lower the costs of prescription drugs by 70 percent, or almost $1.3 trillion. She also wants to encourage public hospitals to accept lower rates, knocking $3 million off the cost of implementation.
Her most well-known — and controversial — method, however, is increasing taxes on the ultra rich instead of the middle class. According to Business Insider reporter Taylor Nicole Rogers, American billionaires only paid 23% of their income in taxes in 2018, whereas the average American paid 28%. Warren recommends raising the rate for the ultra-rich from 3.2% to 4.3% of total wealth. If you do the math, this is only $2,150,000 out of their total accumulation of money. Her plan also includes raising taxes on the financial sector and large, multinational corporations.
In an interview for the Hill, Democratic strategist Brad Bannon was correct when he said, “The fact that she has devised a plan that would benefit middle class Americans without taxing [them] is certainly reassuring to a lot of people,”. Her plan, along with Bernie Sanders’ similar plan for Medicare for All, is what our country needs — progressive frontrunners who are adept at implementing change that will uplift the suffering middle and lower classes in our nation.
Cons
The main issues critics have with Warren’s ambitious plan are, unsurprisingly, economically based.
According to the Washington Post’s editorial board, “Former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers warns that Ms. Warren would so clobber upper-income Americans that she would risk a stock market crash and a recession.” Warren’s plan is advocating against the very basis of capitalism, whereas the U.S. economy is largely stringent on and influenced by capitalism.
Though her plan of action may be very clear and well thought out, critics point out that much of the math she provides either doesn’t add up or isn’t feasible at all. Democratic rival and Sen. Bernie Sanders has also talked about Medicare for All as an important policy issue, but has cited significantly larger numbers for feasible, reasonable implementation given current resources. In her plan, she hasn’t accounted for other resource costs that would drive the nation into even more debt, on top of those already existing.
Many Republicans also find fault with the nature of Medicare for All itself — it extends the federal government’s reach into the U.S. far more than some deem fair. According to former economist for the Obama administration, “New taxes and other revenues that would be imposed would increase Washington’s share of the economy to around 27 percent, a more than 50 percent increase from current levels.” An increase in how much Washington is involved with the services of the public could tread a fine line that dictates how much necessary order the government is implementing on society, and how much this order could be impeding on capitalistic freedom.
Given the resources the US currently has, her plan, though much needed, is too unattainable and unrealistic. While her plan does mention ways her administration is going to crack down on tax evasion, there isn’t a guarantee that the rich aren’t going to continue to find ways to evade these large taxes and continue to find new loopholes in the law, leading to more national debt and a shortcoming in Medicare for All.
Though Warren’s progressive policies for Medicare for All is much needed in an age of sky high pharmaceutical prices and a growing wealth gap, many believe that it cannot be successfully implemented in a capitalistic driven, extremely debt-ridden American society.