Democratic presidential
candidate Elizabeth
Warren’s long-awaited "Medicare-for-all" funding plan
projects the government-run health care system would cost a staggering sum of
"just under $52 trillion" over the next decade, with the campaign
proposing a host of new tax increases to pay for it while still claiming the
middle class would not face any additional burden.
“We don’t need to raise
taxes on the middle class by one penny to finance Medicare for All,” Sen.
Warren, D-Mass., said in her plan — a copy of which was obtained by Fox News.
The campaign's detailed
Medicare-for-all proposal, however, insists that the costs can be covered by a
combination of existing federal and state spending on Medicare and other health
care, as well as roughly $20 trillion in taxes on employers, financial
transactions, the ultra-wealthy and large corporations and some savings
elsewhere. This includes what is essentially a payroll tax increase on
employers, something economists generally say can hit workers in the form of
reduced wages.
Like Medicare-for-all’s
chief Senate champion, fellow candidate Bernie Sanders, the Warren campaign
argues that many of these costs already are being spent in the existing health
care system by governments, employers and individuals in the form of
premiums, deductibles and other expenses.
The Warren campaign claims
those individual costs would drop to “practically zero,” while the plan
maintains and boosts a funding pipeline from other sources. However,
unlike Sanders’ plan, Warren’s projects no burden for the middle class and a
price tag of "just under $52 trillion" over the next 10 years,
or slightly less than cost projections for the current system. Sanders’ plan
has been estimated to cost roughly $32 trillion, though that price tag reflects
additional spending while Warren's seems to factor in current spending as well.
So how would she pay for it?
Among other proposals,
Warren calls for bringing in nearly $9 trillion in new Medicare taxes on
employers over the next 10 years, arguing this would essentially replace what
they’re already paying for employee health insurance. Further, Warren’s
campaign says if they are at risk of falling short of the revenue target, they
could impose a “Supplemental Employer Medicare Contribution” for big companies
with “extremely high executive compensation and stock buyback rates.”
Whether some of those costs,
however, still could be passed on to middle-class employees – as
economists argue payroll tax costs often are – remains to be seen. As the Tax Policy Center has noted, it is assumed the
"employee bears the burden of both the employer and employee portions of
payroll taxes."
Warren also proposes even
more taxes on the ultra-rich, expanding on her previously announced signature
wealth tax, to tax more of anyone’s net worth over $1 billion (estimated to
raise another $1 trillion). Warren also calls for raising capital gains tax
rates for the wealthy, taxing more foreign earnings and imposing a tax on
financial transactions to generate $800 billion in revenue.
Aside from those and other
taxes, the campaign claims they can scrounge up $2.3 trillion with better tax
enforcement and policies, as well as additional funds by reining in defense
spending.
“When fully implemented, my
approach to Medicare for All would mark one of the greatest federal expansions
of middle class wealth in our history,” Warren said in her plan. “And if Medicare
for All can be financed without any new taxes on the middle class, and instead
by asking giant corporations, the wealthy, and the well-connected to pay their
fair share, that’s exactly what we should do.”
Warren has been teasing this
plan for weeks, especially after some of her rivals hammered her campaign on
the financing issue during the last primary debate.
"Your signature,
senator, is to have a plan for
everything except this," South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete
Buttigieg memorably said during last month's Democratic primary debate.
“No plan has been laid out
to explain how a multitrillion-dollar hole in this Medicare-for-all plan that
Senator Warren is putting forward is supposed to get filled in,” he
charged.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.,
also slammed Warren during that debate, saying “at least Bernie’s being
honest here in saying how he’s going to pay for this and that taxes will go up.
And I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but you have not said that and I think we owe it to
the American people to tell them where we’re going to send the invoice.”
Sanders has openly said
taxes will increase “for virtually everybody" but argued the system
will ultimately cost less than what workers currently pay for premiums and
other expenses.
The Warren campaign’s
insistence that the middle class will be spared any such costs is likely to
face sustained skepticism in the Democratic primary field.
Buttigieg reprised his
criticism this week, telling Fox News that his concern about Warren’s plan
“is not just the multi-trillion-dollar hole, but also the fact that most
Americans would prefer not to be told that they have to abandon their private
plan.”
One Emory University health
care expert recently told The Washington Post "there’s no question" a
Medicare-for-all plan "hits the middle class" in some
way. A new study released by the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget also noted
it would be "impossible" to finance any such plan using only taxes on
the wealthiest Americans.
Aside from the cost issues,
Warren did appear to acknowledge this week that Medicare-for-all could
result in substantial job losses, calling it “part of the cost issue” when
confronted with an estimate that nearly 2 million jobs could be shed.
During that same interview
with New Hampshire Public Radio, Warren vowed that she
would “not sign any legislation into law for which costs for middle-class
families do not go down.”
Brooke Singman is a Politics
Reporter for Fox News. Follow her on Twitter at @brookefoxnews.
