How Buttigieg Could Make Things Really Hard for Warren

4. Elizabeth Warren

A five-alarm wonk fire.

Elizabeth Warren, under relentless scrutiny for her refusal to answer a point-blank question about whether her “Medicare for All” plan would necessitate middle-class tax increases, has given in, announcing that she’ll release her plan to pay for it in the coming weeks. It is the most high-pressure moment of her candidacy thus far, and, as the Washington Post reported this week, pretty much the entire economics profession is calling in to give its 2 cents. But all of this brainpower, according to some of the floated plans, seems to be going into semantics. One economist, for example, “has urged Warren’s team to propose financing Medicare-for-all in part with a ‘public premium’ that would function similarly to a tax,” the Post reports. “Under this idea, Warren would propose raising revenue for a Medicare-for-all fund from a premium charge that would go to the government rather than a private insurance company.” This is the insanity of where the health care debate is now: trying to reassure the public, for political palatability’s sake, that it will be paying health care premiums.

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