Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Different Takes: Warren's Plans For 'Medicare For All' Bear No Resemblance To Reality; Warren's Ideas Might Work, But Congress Wouldn't Approve Them Anyway
The Wall Street Journal: Warren Has A (Fantasy) Plan
Now we know why Elizabeth Warren took so long to release the financing details of her Medicare-for-All plan. The 20 pages of explanation she released Friday reveal that she is counting on ideas for cost-savings and new revenue that are a fiscal and health-care fantasy. (11/3)
The New York Times: Did Warren Pass The Medicare Test? I Think So
Last week I worried that Elizabeth Warren had painted herself into a corner by endorsing the Sanders Medicare-for-all plan. It was becoming obvious that she couldn’t stay vague about the details, especially how to pay for it; and some studies, even by center-left think tanks, suggested that any plan along these lines would require large tax hikes on the middle class. So what would she come up with? Well, the Warren plan is now out. And I’d say that she passed the test. Experts will argue for months whether she’s being too optimistic — whether her cost estimates are too low and her revenue estimates too high, whether we can really do this without middle-class tax hikes. You might say that time will tell, but it probably won’t: Even if Warren becomes president, and Dems take the Senate too, it’s very unlikely that Medicare for all will happen any time soon. (Paul Krugman, 11/1)
The Washington Post: The Eight Big Problems With Warren’s Medicare-For-All Plan
The plan, as one would expect, was roundly criticized by former vice president Joe Biden’s campaign, which put out a statement that said it “hinges not just on a giant middle class tax hike and the elimination of all private health insurance, but also on a complete revamping of defense, immigration, and overall tax policy all at once in order to pay for it — a hard truth that underscores why candidates need to be straight with the American people about what they’re proposing.” (Jennifer Rubin, 11/1)
Boston Globe: Elizabeth Warren’s Medicare For All: A Complex Idea With Huge Ramifications For Massachusetts
Elizabeth Warren’s plan for funding universal health care is everything you’d expect from the Massachusetts senator: comprehensive, data-driven yet passionately argued, and reliant on the usual bad guys for paying the tab. Wall Street speculators, tax-dodging multinationals, and 1 percenters would cough up nearly half of the $20.5 trillion in new spending that Warren said Friday would be needed over the next decade to switch everyone to her version of a government-run Medicare for All plan. (Larry Edelman, 11/2)
The Washington Post: What Elizabeth Warren’s New Health-Care Plan Gets Right
Elizabeth Warren just released her health-care plan, and I’m going to do something radical. Instead of directing all your attention to the question of how she’ll pay for it, as 99 percent of the coverage is doing, I’m going to focus on what her plan might mean for — get ready — people’s health care. Don’t get me wrong: The funding is important. But the most important overarching question is what kind of health-care system we want. (Paul Waldman, 11/1)
The New York Times: Elizabeth Warren’s Health Care Albatross
Between the collapse of George W. Bush’s presidency and the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican Party was a more ideological institution than the Democratic Party. Both parties had litmus tests and orthodoxies, but the G.O.P. had more of a “movement” spirit, reflecting the conservatism that had captured it, and ideological enforcers had more influence over its policy debates, more power to decree who counted as a “true conservative” and who was a “Republican In Name Only.” (Ross Douthat, 11/2)
The Washington Post: The Math For Warren’s Health-Care Plan Adds Up If You Accept Its Ludicrous Premise
We need plans, not slogans. That’s the phrase users highlighted the most in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) newly announced Medicare-for-all plan. Which is very on-brand. Andrew Yang may be running with a campaign button reading “Math,” but it’s Warren who has successfully framed herself as the wonk on the debate stage. (Megan McArdle, 11/2)
The New York Times: Warren Goes 1 For 2 On Medicare
Health care will cost the average American person about $11,000 this year. We pay some of those costs directly, through premiums, deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses. Other costs are shrouded, paid through taxes and employer contributions. Either way, the combined total is staggering, easily the world’s highest and more than twice as much per person as in Australia, Britain, Canada, France or Japan. (David Leonhardt, 11/3)
