Warren unveils her $20.5T health care plan
WASHINGTON >> Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Friday revealed her plan to pay for an expansive transformation of the nation’s health care system, proposing huge tax increases on businesses and wealthy Americans to help cover $20.5 trillion in new federal spending.
The plan represents a significant bet that enough voters will favor an approach that dismantles the current system and replaces it with “Medicare for All,” a government-run health insurance program. And it comes after decades in which Democrats have largely tiptoed around policy proposals that relied on major tax increases and Republicans ran on tax cuts.
While the proposal allows Warren to say she is not raising taxes on the middle class, it opened her to renewed charges that her plan is too radical to pass through Congress. It represents an extraordinary embrace of the tax system to redistribute wealth and reengineer one of the pillars of the U.S. economy, with measures that would double her proposed wealth tax on billionaires and impose new levies on investment gains and even stock trades.
“This debate has moved so far and so fast within the Democratic Party, it makes your head spin,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Ideas that used to be political third rails are now being proposed by one of the leading candidates for president.”
Warren, of Massachusetts, is not the only Democratic presidential candidate envisioning a large new government program funded by tax increases. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Warren’s top rival in the party’s progressive wing, is the architect of Medicare for All and has also proposed sweeping changes.
Under Warren’s plan, private health insurance — which now covers most of the population — would be eliminated and replaced by free government health coverage for all Americans. That is a fundamental shift from a market-driven system that has defined health care in the United States for decades but produced vast inequities in quality, service and cost.
Warren would pay for the new federal spending, $20.5 trillion over 10 years, through a mix of sources, including:
• Requiring employers to pay the government a similar amount to what they are currently spending on their employees’ health care, totaling $8.8 trillion over a decade.
• Changing how investment gains are taxed for the top 1% of households, raising $2 trillion, and ramping up her signature wealth tax proposal to be steeper on billionaires, raising another $1 trillion.
• Creating a tax on financial transactions like stock trades, bringing in $800 billion.
Beyond the $20.5 trillion total, she is also counting on states and local governments to contribute an additional $6.1 trillion to help pay for the system.